In 2018, EL PAÍS launched an investigation into paedophilia in the Spanish Church and has a data base updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light of day, 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 Government is taking a stand against the Church’s current management of its cases of paedophilia and is warning the bishops that it “will not accept any unilateral formula” to compensate the victims of cases that have expired that does not contemplate the supervision and control of the State. In a letter dated this Friday, which this newspaper has had access to, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, is putting pressure on the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Archbishop Luis Argüello, to agree on a mixed model of reparation, between the State and the Church, “in accordance with the recommendations of the report of the Ombudsman with the aim of providing the victims with a single system of reparation”. That is to say, that it is the State, through an independent commission, that studies each complaint of the cases that have expired, sets the financial amount and guarantees payment to those affected.
The minister’s demands come four days before the bishops meet in an extraordinary session to approve their own plan to compensate those affected, which they have drawn up without the support of the main victims’ associations and without the collaboration of the State, despite having promised months ago to work with both to jointly address the issue. The news that the CEE will execute its plan without state oversight has fuelled the clash with the Executive. “The participation of the State is not only the only way to faithfully comply with the aforementioned recommendations, but also represents the quickest, most effective and safest way to address the social problem at hand,” Bolaños stresses in the letter.
The spark of the crossfire between the State and the Church was ignited by the publication in October of the Ombudsman’s report on clerical abuse, commissioned by the Congress of Deputies two years ago, in which he recommended the creation of a state fund in which the Church would participate and be supervised by an independent body. The bishops opposed this. They did so again last April, when the Government presented an official reparation plan in which it also proposed a team of specialists to award the reparations and which “would require the collaboration of the Catholic Church to take charge of all or a substantial part of the compensations and to facilitate other elements of symbolic reparation”. The CEE refused to cooperate unless the compensations also included victims from outside the religious sphere and defined the Government’s plan as “part of a condemnatory judgment without any kind of legal guarantee”.
Despite this negative stance by the CEE, the ecclesiastical hierarchy agreed to create a working group with the State to address the issue. There was a first meeting on June 3 and they agreed to meet again that month so that the Church could finally announce whether it would participate in the reparation system proposed by the Government, but the meeting never took place. The protest led Bolaños to send another letter, dated June 27, to which EL PAÍS has had access, in which the minister urges Argüello for the first time to meet to “reach an agreement.” The president of the bishops responded in another letter on July 4 that the work of that group “could be resumed as of next July 10,” after the bishops approved his plan.
It was then that the Minister of the Presidency sent the last letter warning Argüello that he “will not accept” a plan without “criteria and public guarantees” as recommended by the Ombudsman in his report: “It is evident that a unilateral system on the part of the Church could generate distrust in the victims, who may fear being re-victimized or even judged by having to present their requests to the same organization by which they did not feel protected in their day, especially when this system is put in place outside the criteria set by the Ombudsman, which is the institution that has studied the best formulas for listening and reparation,” Bolaños points out in the letter.
The CEE has not detailed the key points of the plan that all Spanish bishops will vote on this Tuesday, but last February it announced that the model will include “a national arbitration commission” in charge of studying each complaint. This national commission will be supported by another commission that will be responsible for establishing a scale of compensation to be paid, always on a case-by-case basis. Both teams will be made up of “recognized experts with a variety of backgrounds” in the legal, civil, canonical, medical and psychological fields and will only analyze cases that have no recourse either in criminal justice due to prescription or within the ecclesiastical courts. For the Government, this “would be especially damaging for the victims and their families, who need a system that generates a safe and reliable environment,” in addition to the fact that “it can generate confusion and dysfunctions.”
With the Church refusing to participate in a common fund, it is up in the air how it will finance what is expected to be a multi-million dollar bill. In other countries, such as France, bishops have announced that they would sell assets and in others, such as the United States, dioceses have declared bankruptcy due to the large sums they have to pay. In European countries, the average amount paid by the Church per victim is about 35,000 euros.
In Spain, the EEC has not announced a scale, but it is enough to analyse the number of victims registered in the country to get an idea of the amount that the Church could pay out. The EL PAÍS database counts at least 2,735 people who accuse 1,532 clerics of paedophilia. However, this figure only refers to the cases that have come to light, that is, a small part if we take into account the report of the Ombudsman, in which it calculates that 1.13% of the population resident in Spain has suffered abuse in ecclesiastical circles: some 440,000 people, according to the calculations of this newspaper.
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