Sexual abuse is not exclusive to the Catholic Church, maintains the report on ecclesial pedophilia prepared by the Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, but the very structure of these other confessions prevents the scandals from reaching the same magnitude “as those that have affected to Catholicism.” Statements like this, however, have been overshadowed by the controversy over his work figures.
The Spanish Episcopal Conference will not officially respond to the Ombudsman's 777-page report until next week, when it will hold an extraordinary assembly to debate this and other issues. The hierarchy of the Church, however, has already announced that its response could be summarized in that well-known saying according to which there are three kinds of lies: the big ones, the very big ones and the statistical ones.
Cardinal Juan José Omella, archbishop of Barcelona and president of the Episcopal Conference, expressed this this Saturday with a message on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter. “The figures extrapolated by some media are lies and are intended to deceive,” he said, quoting the catechism and ending by emphasizing: “We will not tire of asking for forgiveness from the victims and working for their healing.”
The investigation by Ángel Gabilondo, the Ombudsman, includes devastating testimonies, with abused people who claim to act on behalf of “the silent victims.” Gabilondo himself acknowledged after delivering his investigation in Parliament that the purpose of his team was not to establish the number of people affected by this scourge, although he could not prevent the press from extrapolating the data from the survey included in the work of him.
The Ombudsman defended the rigor and representativeness of the chosen sample, a total of 8,013 people over 18 years of age. If such demoscopic results are transferred to the census of Spain (something that the Episcopal Conference harshly criticizes) it would be concluded that more than 400,000 people have been victims of abuse in the ecclesial environment (half of them, directly at the hands of a priest or a religious).
The figure is not very far from that of other neighboring countries, such as France, where the Catholic Church has historically had less weight than in Spain and which has admitted at least 330,000 victims since 1950. But voices have already been raised denouncing that 8,013 People, no matter how well they are selected, are a small universe for extrapolations. The Episcopal Conference will insist on that next week.
In that and the fact that the majority of sexual assaults occur within the family. This is also recognized by the Ombudsman's survey, which also admits that sexual scandals also affect other religious denominations. Their report explains that “in the case of Protestantism the lack of a centralized structure comparable to that of the Roman Catholic Church reduces cases to local stories.”
And this reduction prevents the scandals from “reaching a national or international dimension comparable to those that have affected Catholicism.” The document lists cases of “Hindu gurus, Jewish rabbis from Great Britain and the United States, and Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, Thailand or North America,” as well as “Muslim imams or spiritual guides of Jehovah's Witnesses.”
Many of those involved had characteristics in common with the “cover-up” that some sexual predators in Spain have benefited from, “such as the preponderance of male victims or the practice of changing the destination of the perpetrators.” Sexual abuse would not be “a risk factor exclusive to Catholicism,” but neither would the tendency to throw balls out.
Other confessions also address the response “from the perspective of forgiveness and repentance rather than recognition of the crime and reparation for the victim.” But all aggressors follow the same dynamic: abuse based “on emotional manipulation, spiritual dependence and exploitation of the victim's feeling of guilt.” One of those who has gone to the Ombudsman says: “I felt dirty.”
“The dimension of the abuses has been unknown until now,” states the report of this institution, which recalls that the Ombudsman already addressed the same issue in Catalonia in 2019 and came to the conclusion that “the cases examined are a small part of reality” and “the final figure is much higher than what has been determined.”
