Spanish Catholic Church hears testimony from more than 900 victims of sexual abuse

“We are talking about 927 victims who gave their testimonies”, explained priest José Gabriel Vera Beorlegui, director of the press office of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), in the presentation.

This number is far from the 1.957 victims recorded since the Spanish newspaper El País began an investigation in 2018 and created a database.

It was the newspaper that revealed, on April 30, the abuse of minors perpetrated by Spanish Jesuits in Bolivia, causing a scandal in the South American country.

In March 2022, the Spanish Church had taken the statements of 506 people, as reported at the time.

These 927 victims accused 728 members of the Church, of which “the majority are clerics, they are ordained priests”, specified Vera Beorlegui, regarding a report entitled “To give light”, which was described as the first carried out by the Spanish Church and became public.

Of the identified attackers, 64% died and 36% are alive, the spokesperson continued.

According to a statement released by the CEE, more than 99% of the aggressors were men, with a predominance of boys among the victims, in 82,62% of cases, 17,38% of which were girls.

Vera Beorlegui explained that “199 testimonies are being studied in the offices in order to be able to finalize this pastoral or judicial process with them as appropriate”.

The decade in which the most cases were recorded was the 1970s, with 172, and the oldest reports of abuse date back to the 1940s.

“These are the first two cases that exist, much older people who came to report abuses committed against them”, explained Vera Beorlegui.

The report is called “To give light” because, according to the president of the CEE, Francisco César García Magán, “he wants it to be a declaration of intentions and a path to be followed”.

Unlike countries like Germany, Australia, the United States, France or Ireland, Spain has not completed any major investigation into this topic. Currently, two are underway.

The Spanish Ombudsman's Office is carrying out its investigation at the request of Parliament, while the Church has entrusted its investigation to an independent lawyer's office.

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