The Spanish Episcopal Conference will not officially respond to the Ombudsman's report on child abuse until next week, when it will hold an assembly to debate this issue, among others. The hierarchy of the Church, however, has already advanced that its answer could be summed up in that famous saying according to which there are three kinds of lies: the big ones, the very big ones and the statistics.
Cardinal Joan Josep Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona and president of the Episcopal Conference, expressed this yesterday with a message on the X social network, formerly known as Twitter. "The figures extrapolated by some media are lies and have the intention of deceiving", he said to quote the catechism and end by stressing: "We will never tire of asking for forgiveness from the victims and working for them to heal".
The investigation by Ángel Gabilondo, the Ombudsman, includes devastating witnesses, with abusers who say they are acting on behalf of "the silent victims". Gabilondo acknowledged after submitting his research to Congress that his team's purpose was not to establish the number of people affected by this scourge, although he could not prevent the press from extrapolating the survey data included in the his job
The Ombudsman defended the rigor and representativeness of the sample chosen, a total of 8,013 people over the age of 18. If the demographic results are transferred to the Spanish census, it would be concluded that more than 400,000 people have been victims of abuse in the ecclesiastical sphere (half of them, directly at the hands of a priest or religious).
The figure is not far removed from that of other countries around us, 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 very small universe for extrapolations. This will repeat the Episcopal Conference during the next week.
This and the fact that most 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. His report explains that "in the case of Protestantism, the non-existence of a centralized structure comparable to that of the Roman Catholic Church reduces the cases to local histories".
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", in addition to "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 have benefited from in Spain, "such as the preponderance of male victims or the practice of changing the destination of the perpetrators". Abuse would not be "a risk factor exclusive to Catholicism", but neither would the tendency to throw balls.
Other confessions also approach the answer "from the perspective of forgiveness and repentance rather than the recognition of the crime and the reparation of the victim". But all the aggressors follow the same dynamic: abuse based on "emotional manipulation, spiritual dependence and the exploitation of the victim's sense of guilt". One of the women who declared before the Ombudsman says: "I felt dirty".
"The extent of the abuses has been unknown until now", concludes 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 the reality" and "the final figure is much higher than what has been determined so far".
