"To protect ourselves from the priest, we wrapped ourselves very tightly in the sheets."

BarcelonaThe writer and journalist Leonor Paqué (Vizcaya, 1963) turned her Renault Clio into a mobile refuge for herself, her brother Diego, and their dog Tinta, traveling 20,000 kilometers across Spain. "I wanted to meet other victims of pedophilia. I had a desire to know who they were, what they were like as adults, and what their lives were like," explains Paqué, who was abused by a priest in the early seventies, when she was only eight years old, at the Santa Marina Children's Hospital in Bilbao, where she was hospitalized. With virtually no resources, she and her brother, the flamenco singer-songwriter Diego Paqué, recorded the interviews and have made a documentary that can be seen on Filmin. Sister Leonor. 20,000 km of confession

Paqué has always known what happened to him in that sanatorium, because his mind never erased it from his memory. However, until recently, he couldn't put a name to his abuser: Father Martín Valle García. "He abused me in bed, in the confessional, in different places. He did terrible things to me, and I kept it there, but it was deep down, locked away, like so many other things. I first wrote it down as a novel, In his warm hands (2015) and I realized all the consequences. It was good for me to talk about it with other people, because I recognized many things and they were able to put words to it that I couldn't find," explains Leonor Paqué, who, before making the documentary, along with her brother, went to different Spanish towns to give talks and explain the events. He Country, because The newspaper collected testimonies from victims of abuse in the religious sphere to create a database Faced with the passivity of religious institutions and the government, she recounted her story. As we spoke through the screen—because she lives in Madrid—she recalled how she and her companions, all very young, tried to escape the sanatorium: "We talked amongst ourselves and decided we had to protect ourselves for when the priest came. We wrapped ourselves tightly in bedclothes, as if we were being held captive. She asked what we were doing. When we told her it was because the priest was coming, she bolted, but nothing happened. The nuns there were very cruel," she explained.

Return to the scene of the events

Paqué never wanted to return to that place, which she couldn't even locate on a map, until, more than half a century later, she went there to film. "Even now, I don't know how we filmed it, because Diego kept putting the camera down to comfort me. The place is abandoned, full of trash, but I could see the bed with the green bars. I've traveled to that place many times in my mind, and I've become a helpless child again. There are many victims like us. A helpless child, and I want to tell her everything that no one told her at the time," Paqué explains.

The priest who abused little Leonor had done it before. "Children never forget," says Paqué. The writer and journalist saw the priest again when she left the sanatorium. Diego Paqué explains: "My sister and my mother had heard that there was a priest in Bilbao who helped families in need. My father became ill, and they went to see him. When Martín Valle recognized Leonor, he refused to help my mother and told her to take out a loan." Leonor, at that moment, kept repeating to her mother, "It's him, it's him." But she didn't tell her mother what had happened until she was 47. "I have three younger siblings, and I tried to protect them. At that time, that was my priority," she says.

It wasn't easy making a documentary just the two of them, traveling in a Clio. "Diego is a musician and learned to edit. We dedicated three years to making the documentary, and the victims opened their doors to us. They were eager to talk and to be heard, and we did so with respect. They knew we wouldn't doubt their testimony and that we wouldn't judge them. We looked them in the eyes, we let them, let them, let them, let them," she says, adding that she reported the case to the courts and also to the Episcopal Conference. "I went to the police station, and a member of the Ertzaintza (Basque Police) attended to me. The statute of limitations had expired, but they wanted to document it; they weren't prepared for these kinds of cases." He asked me my height, the abuser's age... I was eight years old, I can't remember all of this. There wasn't even any psychological support. They asked me about the files, but I've never been able to access them – Paqué laments. At most, you can get the priests removed, and even then, they send them to a place where they're cared for, with a roof over their heads, hot food... How many victims of pedophilia have this?

When the two brothers have screened the documentary, "the reaction has been absolute silence." "But afterwards, many people have contacted us," explains Diego Paqué. They have both given talks, and almost always, when they finish, some members of the audience approach them. "There's always someone who tells us that they also suffered abuse," adds Diego Paqué.

The country with the most cases in the world

During the dictatorship, the Spanish Catholic Church wielded considerable power, and it still does. There has always been a veil of silence surrounding the abuses suffered by thousands of children. In October 2023, the ombudsman published a report of more than 700 pages Regarding abuses suffered within the religious sphere, the report, which involved interviews with over 8,000 people, highlights the number of victims: 1.13% of the adult population (approximately 440,000 people) suffered abuse in religious settings. This figure makes Spain the country with the most cases in the world. The actual number could be much higher, as many victims have never spoken out and, as the report explains, there has been little cooperation in the investigation. Many dioceses refused to provide information, and access to archives was denied. "The Catholic Church's response, at least officially, has long been to deny or minimize the problem," the report states. The Spanish Episcopal Conference's (CEE) response to the investigative commission's request for information was not particularly cooperative, but rather "cautious and reluctant," the document notes. "Despite a declared willingness to cooperate, the data has been presented in a way that tends to minimize the phenomenon and relegate it to a marginal aspect within the institution, emphasizing the social dimension of the problem and avoiding addressing the internal factors that may foster the dynamics of abuse. All this without forgetting that, in many cases, the Church covered up the acts or sent priests to other locations where they could continue abusing children. Or, even worse, pressured the victims or blamed them for the acts."