The Spanish Episcopal Conference presented this Thursday the mandatory instruction on how to act before the sexual abuse caseswhich it approved on May 9, accompanied by the first general report on the cases that have come to its attention: 728 complaints that would affect 927 minor or vulnerable victims between 1940 and 2022.
The Spanish Catholic Church aspires to make it clear (‘To give light’, titles its report) that it has already assumed a few principles that should have always been obvious. As the priority of defending the rights of the victim against the protection of the good name of the institution through concealment or the corporate protection of the culprit, in a manifestation, the most unjustifiable of all, of what Pope Francis himself described in his day as “the disease of clericalism.” Or that the denunciation, clarification, compensation and criminal punishment of criminal acts can never be replaced by moral correctness within the Church, according to its criteria and values. Too many times the atrocities of priests and religious have been treated as sins to be secretly confessed, internally expiated and finally forgiven.
The instruction approved by the bishops is on the right track, the only possible one. Insist on the obligation of bishops, priests and religious to collaborate with criminal justice of each State, denouncing or testifying, and with the obligation to report to the prosecution, and “immediately” if there is “danger to the victim” if in their internal investigations rational evidence of the commission of a crime is obtained. Or remember that simply moving the abuser to avoid scandal is not the appropriate response.
If the episcopate should have left something so obvious in writing, however, it is because some of its members, or heads of religious congregations, have continued to this very day preferring concealment and impunity. For washing dirty clothes inside the house (or even worse, for not doing even this). The cases known in recent weeks, this time in the sphere of the Society of Jesus, make it clear that perhaps the most numerous and scandalously unpunished situations of abuse are a thing of the past in which the authority of the abuser and the silence of the environment (in religious institutions, in educational centers, in families…) were the norm: but the cloak of cover-up on situations that were notorious has reached today. And, of course, so do the consequences of the damage done on the victims and the need to do justice and, with it, prevent this scourge from reproducing.
The figures recognized this Thursday by the bishops may be the tip of the iceberg. When the clergy abuse scandal in Ireland erupted in full force two decades ago, it was unlikely that the same would not happen in other countries, such as Spain, where the unchallenged authority of the Catholic Church (the climate that makes abuse possible in any institution) had been for decades as intense or more. It’s taken too many years to begin to lift this thick veil here: and it has not been through a process of self-criticism and transparency but through the bravery of the victims who found a way to make their voices heard in the media.