Pedophilia in the Church: the tip of the iceberg
After decades of silence, the Spanish Catholic Church has finally and explicitly acknowledged its responsibility for the sexual abuse of minors, and it is doing so hand in hand with and under the watchful eye of the State. Specifically, under the oversight and mediation of the Ombudsman's office. It was about time. Better late than never. There is a great deal of work to be done. This should be just the beginning, and the Church should be the first to be interested in seeing this through to the end.
Without the impetus and the explicit mea culpa Without the institutional approach of the previous Pope, Francis, who called for clear action from the hierarchy—a line that Leo XIV is following—this step would surely not have been taken. The agreement presented this Thursday between the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the presidents of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Luis Argüello, and the Spanish Conference of Religious, Jesús Díaz Sariego, is important and certainly welcome. But it has been hard-won. Too hard. Along the way, a long and thick shadow of silence has been cast, a persistent practice of years and years consisting of hiding shameful acts and, therefore, a conscious cover-up of crimes and an equally conscious abandonment of underage victims, who have been denied justice and condemned to mere paupers. Finally, then, it will be possible to begin working to reverse such impunity.
In Catalonia, some Catholic religious orders and dioceses have only just begun, and tentatively at that, in recent years, to acknowledge cases, prompted by public denunciations stemming from journalistic investigations by ARA and other media outlets. However, the feeling is that so far we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of pedophilia abuse. There is much work to be done, much reparation pending, much pain yet to be uncovered.
Across Spain, according to the report on pedophilia in the ChurchPrepared by the Ombudsman in 20231.13% of the adult population has suffered sexual abuse within religious settings, and 0.6% directly at the hands of priests and religious figures. Extrapolating these figures, this would represent approximately 440,000 victims in the first case and 234,000 in the second, out of a total of around 39 million adults nationwide. Clearly, there is a great deal of justice still owed.
The agreement reached between the Church and the State is only a starting point. We will have to pay close attention to how it develops: what tangible results it yields, how they are implemented, and how they are explained. It would be a failure if the processes were to slow down and drag on indefinitely. Too much time has already passed. In any case, the fact that the religious institution will ultimately submit—in cases where there is no agreement between the parties—to the Ombudsman's judgment is significant and lends credibility to the agreement. And at the Catalan level, it would make perfect sense to also establish a specific mechanism between the Catalan Ombudsman and the Church authorities in the region. In fact, Catalonia is the territory in Spain where the most cases have come to light and where some reparations have begun. It is time to take further steps forward.
