Juan Carlos Elizalde, Bishop of Vitoria, is blunt about the reports of abuse of minors in the Church: “Nothing like this should ever have happened (…) Despite the fact that we have all arrived late, the most important thing is that we are still time to achieve justice, reparation, accompaniment and prevention,” he wrote in a pastoral letter last week. The Biscayan priest Carlos Olabarri, director of the Commission for the Protection of Minors and Prevention of Abuse created in 2019 by the diocese of Bilbao, has also intoned this weekend in a Eucharist the mea culpa for the cases of pederasty that are being investigated: “We are not late; we’re too late. It is true, we have hidden, we have covered up, we have looked the other way”. The Basque Church assumes its sins in this way and undertakes to collaborate in clarifying “these crimes”, according to Prelate Elizalde.
The Biscayan bishopric has reported this Monday that it has received so far twenty complaints of abuse, of which six affect diocesan priests on whom investigations are already being carried out. The Biscayan Vicariate General addressed this past weekend to the parishioners a letter that was read at the Sunday masses. “The fact that it is a widespread problem does not exempt us from our specific moral obligations to society as a whole,” the letter said. “We want to listen to the victims, investigate, repair and, above all, heal the wounds of those who have suffered any type of abuse, regardless of when it occurred. And this because the pain suffered does not prescribe”.
In one of these Eucharists, Olabarri, the parish priest of Gernika, in addition to reading the official statement, made a brief introduction in which he proclaimed: “The only victims are the children. They are not the church, nor the priests, nor the diocese, nor the parishes”. In addition, he admitted the mistakes made by the ecclesial institutions by stating that they have done “the wrong things”, although “that does not mean that what is being tried to do now has some value”, he assured in relation to the investigations that the Church is conducting. . The Bilbao diocese had already recognized the work carried out by the newspaper EL PAÍS in its Report on cases of child abuse in the Spanish Churchpublished on December 19, 2021 and that already adds 611 cases of pederasty within the Church and 1,246 victims.
With the same tone of regret and regret, Bishop Elizalde assures in the pastoral letter that what happened is inadmissible, must be corrected and requires an investigation in which the Church must collaborate. He is very critical of the religious and lay people who have been able to intervene in cases of pederasty: “Those people who have taken advantage of their position in the Church to commit these crimes should never have held any pastoral responsibility, much less with minors.” And he adds: “what has been done hurts us greatly and saddens us deeply and at the same time encourages us to be vigilant for any signs of suspicion now and in the future.”
The prelate of Vitoria affirms that his diocese is working so that this problem “does not recur” and guarantees that no effort will be spared in it and “in accompanying the people who suffered these atrocious events in their childhood, whether or not they have prescribed by civil means or the abuser has died. “This Church wants to walk in the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, sometimes for some and sometimes for others. Telling the truth, as an exercise in transparency and honesty, is one more way of being with the victims and showing them that there is no concealment or silence in the face of what happened to them”, he points out in his letter.
The diocese of Vitoria, says its head, is trying to “accompany the victims” while supporting the judicial investigations to be carried out “with the collaboration of the Church.” Elizalde believes that the proposal that the Ombudsman, as an “independent and autonomous figure”, direct the drafting of a report with the help of experts and church representatives is “one more measure of transparency and justice.”
If you know of any case of sexual abuse that has not come to light, write to us with your complaint at [email protected]
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