An impartial committee released on Friday concluded that since 1940, the Roman Catholic clergy in Spain had sexually molested over 200,000 kids. Although a precise number was not provided, the research stated that 0.6 percent of Spain’s adult population, which is estimated to be over 39 million, reported having been sexually abused as children by members of the clergy.
At a press conference held to announce the report’s conclusions, Spain’s national ombudsman, Angel Gabilondo, stated that the number jumps to 1.13 percent, or more than 400,000 persons, when abuse by lay members is taken into account. After several global scandals involving child sexual abuse over the past 20 years, the newest to rattle the Roman Catholic Church are the discoveries from Spain. However, in contrast to other countries, claims of clergy abuse in Spain, a historically Catholic nation that has turned heavily secular, are only now beginning to gather traction, prompting survivors to accuse the government of stonewalling.
The former education minister Gabilondo stated, “Unfortunately, there has been a certain desire to deny abuses or a desire to conceal or protect the abusers for a long time. “The report labels the Catholic Church’s reaction to child abuse cases involving clergy as “insufficient,” criticising the church’s approach. It suggested setting up a public fund to compensate the victims. offices for child protection.
The Spanish Bishops Conference said that it would conduct a special meeting on Monday to address the report’s findings, just before to it being presented in parliament. The establishment of an impartial commission headed by the nation’s ombudsman to “shed light” on claims of sexual abuse of “defenceless boys and girls” within the Catholic Church was overwhelmingly authorised by the Spanish parliament in March 2022. The Catholic Church in Spain, which had for years steadfastly refused to conduct its own investigation, cooperated with the independent investigation by offering records on sexual abuse cases gathered by dioceses, but otherwise refusing to participate.
However, as political pressure grew, it assigned a private law company a “audit” of past and current sexual abuse by clergy, teachers, and other Church-affiliated individuals in February 2022, with the expectation that it would be finished by the end of the year. In June, the Spanish Church announced that, thanks to a complaints process that was started in 2020, it had found 927 cases of child abuse. It claims the it has established “child protection” offices inside dioceses and processes for handling cases of sexual abuse. “Iceberg tip” However, a 2018 investigation by the popular daily El Pais revealed 2,206 victims and 1,036 accused perpetrators going back to 1927.
Prior to the report’s publication on Friday, the newspaper stated, “According to experts, this is just the tip of the iceberg.” When the Boston Globe newspaper disclosed in 2002 that church leaders had concealed the sexual abuse of minors by priests for decades, the abuse epidemic within the Church shot to prominence on a global scale. Later reports of widespread child abuse emerged in Chile, Australia, the United States, and Europe, undermining the 1.3 billion-member Church’s moral authority and reducing its membership. An impartial panel in adjacent France came to the conclusion in 2021 that since 1950, clergy had sexually molested some 216,000 youngsters, the majority of whom were boys. A survey conducted in Germany between 1946 and 2014 discovered 3,677 cases of abuse, whereas in Ireland, a government programme for victims of abuse at juvenile facilities administered by the Catholic.