The State Attorney General’s Office has ordered this Monday the 17 superior prosecutors in all of Spain to send it within a period of 10 days all the criminal procedures (complaints and complaints) in process referring to assaults and sexual abuse of minors in the bosom from congregations, schools or any religious institution. All of them “initiated both in judicial and fiscal headquarters”, according to the document to which EL PAÍS has had access. With this, the Prosecutor’s Office intends to have an X-ray of the problem of pederasty within the Church. This unprecedented mandate will involve an exhaustive investigation in a short period of time, since the records of this type of process in the annual reports never specify whether the crime was committed within or outside the religious sphere. The collection that the prosecutors will carry out will not represent all of these crimes, since some of them do not reach civil justice, but are instructed in ecclesiastical processes. It is the bishops and the superiors of the religious orders who have been in charge of judging them and, on some occasions, of issuing compensation or of silencing what happened.
The request from the public ministry comes in the midst of the pederasty scandal that the Spanish Church is experiencing after EL PAÍS delivered to Pope Francis and the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Cardinal Juan José Omella, a dossier with 251 cases unprecedented reports of abuses committed by priests, religious and lay religious workers. The journalistic work, launched in October 2018, has prompted United We Can, ERC and EH Bildu to present a petition to Congress last week for the creation of a commission to investigate these crimes. This Tuesday the admission to process of the initiative is decided to debate it in the plenary session of the Chamber.
It is not the first time that the Administration has tried to compile the data. In January 2019, the Government requested the then State Attorney General, María José Segarra, to inform it of the proceedings opened in court for cases of pederasty committed within the Church, both in the parishes that depend on the diocese and in the colleges of religious congregations. A month later, the Ministry of Justice, when Dolores Delgado was in charge, asked the CEE to inform it of the cases it knew about, a gesture that made the ecclesiastical hierarchy feel bad. And in fact, they didn’t reply.
Months later, in June of that same year, the public prosecutor’s office sent a letter to the Ministry of Justice explaining that its computer records on proceedings opened for assault or sexual abuse of minors do not allow discrimination against whether they have been committed within religious institutions or in other places, and only detailed to the ministry general data of abuses that were registered in Spain. In order to know these cases, it was necessary to launch a review like the one that the Prosecutor’s Office ordered on Monday: that each provincial prosecutor’s office investigate each of its files.
Despite the lack of figures, the conclusions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in said document were forceful: it pointed out the “opacity” of the Church and urged the Government to mobilize and take measures. In the document, he suggested to the Executive that investigative commissions similar to those that countries like Australia or the Netherlands had established, made up of groups of independent experts and that have investigated these crimes for years, be set up. In them, channels were opened so that the victims could give their testimony, they conducted thousands of interviews and delivered an exhaustive final report. Later, the victims were compensated.
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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