About pederasts and the spokespersons of 'The Escape'

TV3 premiered on Tuesday a new installment of La fugida, the documentary series that collects the investigative work of journalist Guillem Sánchez on sexual abuse committed in religious environments. In 2024 we saw a first season. But each broadcast calls on new victims and, therefore, other aggressors are also denounced. This time, the three new episodes (which you will find on the 3Cat platform) focused on cases linked to the Escolapis and the Escola Pare Manyanet in Barcelona.As always, the victims' stories are devastating, and even more so when the impunity of the abusers and the complicity of the institutions that protect them are flagrant. The Escape. Hidden Truths provokes deep indignation.The investigative work is impeccable: it listens to and protects victims and seeks accredited voices that lend solidity to their account. Perhaps the need to recreate scenes that allude directly to episodes of abuse is what grinds a little. Despite the prudence of these brief fictions, they incorporate a morbid element that makes it inevitable to consider what the objective of the dramatizations is and whether there is a real need to include them. Having to recreate a priest putting a child on his lap might be too much.Guillem Sánchez manages to speak with some of the aggressors. The scene in which he intercepts the religious man Josep Blay leaving a school after the Escolapis have denied their proximity to minors is particularly striking. He also has a conversation with the missionary Manel Sales on a bus. The pretexts of dead musk, the evasions, the lack of memory, and the paternalistic arguments of the aggressors are disgusting. But surely they are only the rudimentary and clumsy version of a rhetoric and cynicism that end up being representative of their religious communities.And here is where we enter the most scandalous part denounced by Guillem Sánchez. Both Jordi Vilà, provincial of the Escolapios, and Borja Aitor Arriaga, spokesperson for Escola Pare Manyanet, are exposed in the documentary. They make a resounding ridicule. When it is said that shame must change sides, it is obvious that it must not only fall on the abusers, but on all those who try to protect them through a discourse full of confusions, imprecisions, and misleading arguments. Both had to rectify statements made in front of the cameras afterwards. Vilà and Arriaga have been discredited as journalistic sources with their pathetic role. The story of the Pare Manyanet IT technician is essential to understanding the strategies of these religious institutions.On the other hand, perhaps we should stop using the ecclesiastical jargon of "father", "brother", and "community" to refer to abusers in documentaries about sexual abuse by the Church, and call them by their first and last names, without euphemisms. Because religious terms symbolically frame these people and institutions in a sphere that seems parallel to that of civil society, even more distant or elevated. And, after all, before justice they are like any of us. Even if they don't think so.