For three years, the Spanish daily “El Pais” collected numerous testimonies from victims of violence and sexual assault in the Church. According to the newspaper, their total number has risen to at least 1,237 since the 1930s and testimonies collected indicate that there may be thousands more.
After France, Spain also has the right to its scandal of scale of pedophilia in the Church. A daily survey El Pais of 251 suspected pedophiles in the Spanish Catholic Church has been forwarded to the Vatican, which has opened internal investigations, according to a newspaper article on Sunday. “The Church has opened a major investigation, unprecedented in Spain, on 251 members of the clergy and some lay people from religious institutions accused of sexual assault on minors, on which El Pais has investigated over the past three years “, writes the Spanish newspaper.
“After three years of verification work, and after having discarded many other testimonies which are still the subject of an investigation, they gather plausibility, sufficient evidence or relevant information for the ecclesiastical authorities to be able to clarify them. or take action “, explain the journalists ofEl Pais as a preamble to their investigation.
At least 1,237 victims since the 1930s
The accusations and testimonies collected relate to facts that occurred between 1943 and 2018 detailed in a report submitted to the Pope on December 2, specifies the daily, which published the first anonymized data of these cases on its website. According to El Pais, while the total number of victims has risen to at least 1,237 since the 1930s, the testimonies collected indicate that there could be thousands more.
In matters of sexual violence, the Church’s investigations are opened and carried out from the Vatican by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was not, on Sunday, in a position to confirm the opening of the investigation. For its part, the Spanish Episcopal Conference “Reiterates its interest and readiness to carry out an investigation into all cases of abuse” and “Encourages all victims to submit complaints”, in a press release released on Sunday. The vast majority of cases, 77%, concern religious orders, which are not under the authority of the bishops. The main congregations, informed by El Pais allegations concerning them, have already opened an investigation, says the newspaper.
“Very few” cases according to the Church
“So far the Spanish Catholic Church has repeated that it does not know how many cases of abuse have taken place in Spain, even if she assures us that they are “very few”, the newspaper has however already received more than 600 messages on the e-mail address dedicated to collecting complaints, launched three years ago ”, note El Pais. Since 2001, the Vatican says it has received 220 complaints of sexual violence in the Spanish Church, said a spokesperson for the Spanish Episcopal Conference. The report ofEl Pais has therefore collected more complaints in three years than the congregation during the last twenty years.
The log indicates that he “Will now publish the stories behind each case, with the testimonies of the victims” after providing, as a first step, a list of the limited details of all these cases.