United We Can (UP), ERC and EH Bildu have presented this Wednesday in Congress a petition for the creation of a commission to investigate pederasty in the Spanish Catholic Church. UP had already announced its intention to take this step in October, in a round of consultations by this newspaper with the main parties on the issue, and it was the only one willing to do so. Since then, UP has spoken with other forces and has finally taken the initiative with the Catalan and Basque formations to “investigate sexual assaults in childhood and adolescence committed by members of the Catholic Church” and with the purpose of obtaining “information necessary to be able to plan public policies for reparation, prevention and care for the victims of this scourge,” according to the petition of the proposition. According to the regulations of the Chamber, the investigation commissions can be “on any matter of public interest.”
The commission, in the words of Sofía Castañón, spokesperson for the UP group, is part of the investigation that EL PAÍS has been carrying out since 2018 on abuses in the Spanish Church and, specifically, of the dossier with 251 unpublished cases that this newspaper delivered to the Pope already Episcopal Conference last December. “This investigation cannot remain within the doors and walls of the Church. For us to be talking about truth, justice and reparation for the victims, who in their childhood or adolescence suffered these abuses and these aggressions, what is necessary is one that challenges the legislative sphere, ”said the spokeswoman after registering the petition. “It is an outstanding debt in our country. It is not a question of ideologies, but of protecting our childhood”, she added.
The commission, which requires at least two groups to be proposed, must still be approved by a majority to become a reality and, in practice, remains in the hands of the PSOE. On this, the deputy of EH Bildu Bel Pozueta has stressed that “the ball is on the roof” of the socialist group, which she asks to “dare” and carry out this process. Sources from the PSOE have declared this Wednesday to EL PAÍS that they have to analyze the proposal before making a pronouncement.
If successful, it would be the first time that an institution of national scope undertook measures to clarify the scandal of abuses in the clergy. In this way, Spain would break its inaction on the issue and follow the example of countries such as Ireland or Australia, where the State assumed the investigation of past cases. So far, initiatives have only emerged at the regional level, in the Government of Navarra or the Síndic de Greuges, the ombudsman, in Catalonia.
“The time of impunity is over”, Pilar Vallugera, from Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, forcefully underlined. Another of the points on which he insists, and which also appears in the document that they have presented, is the importance of clarifying “if there has also been some type of political responsibility in the concealment of these facts that, more or less, were known” . If approved, the commission will investigate, among other issues, the scope of the cover-up of said crimes within the Church, the degree of knowledge in public organizations of the existence of these practices and the approximate number of victims and abusers.
Until now, in this process the Spanish Church is investigating itself, without any transparency and in a fragmented, non-centralized way. Between dioceses and orders, there are about 70 different entities that are investigating their own cases, each with its own criteria. The Spanish Church has always refused to review the past, reveal the cases it knows about and create an independent commission to do this work, as the bishops of France or Germany have done. The only accounting of existing cases in Spain is the one kept by this newspaper, the sum of its investigations and sentences and information from other media, and already amounts to more than 600 cases with more than 1,300 victims since the 1940s.
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On the other hand, the attitude of the church leadership, points out the president of the United We Can parliamentary group, Jaume Asens, has been “obstructionist”, a reason that has pushed these groups to launch the commission’s initiative. “These are abominable events that not only challenge the victims, but also challenge the rest of us as a society,” Asens said. The United We Can parliamentary group was the only one in Congress that, asked by this newspaper in October, was in favor of establishing a truth commission from the State itself, in the style of those instituted years ago in countries like Australia. “For dignity and human rights, this should have the support of the rest of the parliamentary groups. Our position is that, if the Prosecutor’s Office does not initiate the investigations, the State would have to open a procedure for the victims. Because maintaining and supporting silence is an important democratic loss,” Castañón affirmed. Then, the rest of the main parties in Congress (PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, PNV, Vox and ERC) kept silent. When consulted in this regard, the Government and the Ministries of Justice, Presidency and Social Rights, the State Attorney General’s Office and the Ombudsman also claimed that they were not competent to address the issue.
The precedents of Australia and Ireland
Many countries have tried different formulas to know the magnitude of the phenomenon of pederasty in the Catholic Church. Australia is one of the reference examples. At the request of Prime Minister Julia Gilliard, the Governor General of the Commonwealth of Australia created a Royal Commission in 2013. In 2017, he presented a report noting nearly 5,000 cases committed by 1,800 clerics. The Government allocated 40 million dollars (about 34.5 million euros) and the Church promised to repair the victims with compensation of up to 150,000 Australian dollars (just over 94,000 euros).
In Ireland, one of the first states to act, the government formed a commission in 1999. In total, more than 1,300 Irish priests have been accused of child abuse. In Germany, the Government launched an independent commission in 2010 to support victims of pederasty from any institution, collect information and dialogue with politicians about possible reforms. In Belgium, Parliament created the Commission for the Treatment of Complaints of Sexual Abuse in the Pastoral Relationship of Belgium, an independent body founded in 2001 and chaired by child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, which compiled the cases of 475 victims of pedophilia since 1960 , of which 13 ended up committing suicide. During the investigation, the Belgian authorities searched the episcopal see of Mechelen (Antwerp) to confiscate files relevant to the investigation, although a Belgian court soon declared it illegal.
In the United States, on the other hand, it was the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York that opened an investigation in 2004 that concluded that, between 1950 and 2002, at least 4,392 clergymen had abused more than 10,600 people. More than a decade later, in August 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report revealed that 300 priests abused some 10,000 children over the last seven decades. State Attorney General Josh Shapiro concluded that there was “a systematic cover-up by senior Church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.”
If you know of any case of sexual abuse that has not seen the light of day, write to us with your complaint at [email protected]
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