EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has a database updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: [email protected]. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: [email protected].
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The Ombudsman has already set a delivery date for the report on pedophilia in the Spanish Catholic Church that the Congress of Deputies commissioned him a year and a half ago: next Friday. A spokesperson for the institution has told EL PAÍS that the head of the entity, Ángel Gabilondo, will hold a press conference that same day, when he will report on the most important data that the document presumably includes: the number of victims, the accused, the list of dates and places where the events occurred and, above all, the role that the ecclesiastical hierarchy played in covering up, silencing and covering up these crimes. He will also detail the battery of legislative proposals contained in the document, especially those relating to reparation for victims and the prevention of these crimes. It remains up in the air when Gabilondo’s report will be officially presented to Parliament. The assignment of this investigation to the Ombudsman, the first official in Spain, was approved in Congress with a large majority, with the only opposition from Vox.
The delivery date has been a surprise. Although Gabilondo informed from the beginning that before the end of the legislature he would appear to report on the progress of the investigation, it was believed that the commission’s work would last longer. The defender has taken 14 months to prepare his report, from July 2022, when he formed the independent commission, until the beginning of October 2023. If the official Spanish investigation is compared with that of other countries, the defender’s investigation has been much shorter. . Australia took five years to carry out its study and France, which estimated the number of victims at 330,000, three years.
Gabilondo formed two teams to launch the project: one composed of salaried psychologists to listen to the victims and another of 17 specialists and three members of the Ombudsman’s office, Gabilondo himself and his two deputies, to analyze the cases and prepare The report. The rest of the members are external advisors from the professional and academic field, with experience in caring for victims, with legal knowledge and in victimology. Among them, Miguel García-Baró López, professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas and coordinator of the Repara Project—office for attention to victims of abuse of the Archdiocese of Madrid—stands out; María Jesús Raimundo, prosecutor of the Technical Secretariat of the State Attorney General’s Office; Josep María Tamarit, professor of Criminal Law at the Open University of Catalonia and co-author of the report Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: analysis of the problem and the legal and institutional response and also co-author of the same report Gema Varona, professor of Victimology and Criminal Policy at the University of the Basque Country.
Care for victims
In this time, more than half a thousand victims have come to the institution to report the abuse they suffered when they were a minor by a clergyman or member of the Church. The defender enabled several service channels – an email, a telephone and an in-person office in Madrid – and also created a mobile unit to travel throughout Spain to interview dozens of affected people. A spokesperson for the public body explains that this care will continue to be offered to victims for a while longer, although he believes that these new cases will not significantly modify the conclusions of the final report.
The Ombudsman also requested from EL PAÍS the four reports that it delivered in the last year to the Spanish Episcopal Conference and the Vatican, with more than 500 unpublished cases, and also the database of the investigation into pedophilia that this newspaper promoted in September from 2018 and which continues until today. In this database it is the only one that publicly reports the accounting of the number of cases of sexual abuse in the Spanish Catholic Church, which today reaches 1,036 accused and 2,206 victims.
The collaboration of the Church, despite the insistence of the Ombudsman, has been limited: it has neither opened its archives nor provided detailed documentation of the cases it knows about. Last March, Gabilondo asked the bishops by letter to send him all the complaints of which he was aware. Weeks later, the Spanish Episcopal Conference delivered six volumes to the Ombudsman with 728 cases and thousands of pages with the prevention and action protocols followed by his diocese, but did not report key data, such as the names of the accused.
Precisely, the delivery of the Ombudsman’s report coincides with the delay of the audit on pedophilia in the Church that, in parallel, the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) commissioned 18 months ago from the law firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo. In fact, a week ago the EEC gave a 10-day ultimatum to the office that, if the promised report was not received, it would understand that it had breached the contract. The agreement established a work execution period of 12 months. Javier Cremades, president of the company, responded this Wednesday that he will not comply with the deadline now imposed by the bishops and that the audit will reach the Church in December, although he has promised to deliver an executive summary soon.
It is expected that in the presentation of this audit, which the Spanish Church always refused to launch, figures on the number of victims will also be provided and the proposal of a reparation model for dioceses and religious orders to pay compensation to the victims. . However, Cremades told this newspaper that the number of victims will be several thousand and that the proposal to compensate will be the same as that followed by the German Church, based on a recognition process in which each testimony is studied and then an arbitration court establishes the amounts. The ranges that German prelates are paying are around 50,000 euros.
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