MADRID (SPAIN)
Barron's [New York NY]
November 21, 2024
By Agence France Presse
Spain’s ombudsman on Thursday urged the country’s Catholic Church to compensate victims of sexual abuse committed on the institution’s watch.
Unlike in other nations, clerical abuse allegations have only recently started to gain traction in Spain, once a deeply Catholic country which has become increasingly secular.
Figures published last year in the first-ever official report on child sexual abuse within the Church in Spain estimated that more than 400,000 minors had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Roman Catholic clergy and other lay people since 1940.
Spain’s leftist government approved a plan in April to implement the report’s recommendations, including the creation of a state compensation fund for victims.
But the southern European country’s Catholic Church has ruled out taking part in such a fund if it was only for compensating victims of ecclesiastical abuse and not victims of sexual abuse in any setting.
“I consider it essential that, for the sake of the victims, Church and state adopt joint commitments” to compensate the victims, Spain’s national ombudsman, Angel Gabilondo, told parliament, adding it is necessary to “put reparation for victims before any ideological difference or belief”.
The Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), which groups the country’s leading bishops, presented its own compensation plan for victims in July but has yet to give details about how or when it would be implemented.
It commissioned its own audit into abuse from a law firm which identified some 2,056 victims of abuse.
A few days after this audit was released, the CEE published its own report with even lower figures — 1,057 “registered cases” of sexual abuse, of which only 358 had been “proven” or were “plausible”.
Victims groups have denounced the Church’s lack of transparency and its failure to offer any reparations. — Agence France-Presse