The Commissioner of Grievances, Esther Giménez-Salinas, appeared yesterday before the Commission of Inquiry of the Parliament of Catalonia on pederasty in the Church. "Sexual abuse is not a sin. It's a crime," he said. The Syndic regretted that the Church does not even have a unified protocol and recommended creating a single body to attend to the victims of this scourge, in line with what the Ombudsman has also requested.
"It is of little use to me that it is said that there is more abuse in the family". It is "horrible" and you more, to go off on a tangent and avoid the issue, "because we are not here to compare what is worse". Giménez-Salinas claims that black crime figures are a pyramid. At the base there are "unreported or uninvestigated crimes", and at the top, "the others".
"The black figure of criminality in the sexual abuse of the Church is immense", he emphasized. "We have committed barbarities with our children", he said at another point in the appearance, and stressed that not all the perpetrators "are octogenarians or have already died. If we pay attention to the figures of the Ombudsman, there are many".
Not punishing these behaviors "leads to impunity", he insisted. The statute of limitations, from which so many pederasts have benefited, "does not extinguish the crime, it only extinguishes the criminal liability. But time does not heal the victims of sexual abuse and, above all, it does not make the guilty innocent." If "there has been no transparency" anywhere, he added, it is in the chapter on abuses in the ecclesiastical sphere.
The dynamic of sin, confession and penance, insisted the Syndica, is of no use, because "we are not dealing with sins, but with crimes". The allegations of opacity were ratified by Aida C. Rodríguez, attached to the Sindicatura de Greuges for the defense of the rights of children and youth, who also appeared there. Both criticized the lack of a single body for victims.
One of his proposals, which Parliament will study, is the creation of this centralized body to attend to the abused. Deputy Glòria Freixa, from Junts per Catalunya, said that it is the same "if there is one or 400,000 victims. This has happened and requires a unified, clear and institutional response". The fact that most abuses are intrafamilial, added Raquel Sans, from ERC, "does not exclude the Church's institutional responsibility". The work of the Parliament's investigative commission, which was once again not attended by Vox, Ciutadans and the PP (the CUP neither this time, but because its representative alleged a "family emergency") is taking place in the middle of a tsunami by the Ombudsman's report, which did not cite numbers of victims. But there could be more than 400,000, if the results of their survey are extrapolated and which the Spanish Episcopal Conference disqualified.
"This is too small a survey for such conclusions and the margin of error of all demographic research is ignored", say the critics. Supporters counter that the margin of error could be lower or higher, and that 400,000 victims is not far from those reported in France, where the Church has less influence and has admitted 330,000 victims. .
The controversy coincides with Pope Francis' unusual call to the Spanish bishops at the end of this month. Esther Giménez-Salinas took advantage of her appearance to advise the creation of a single institution to attend to the victims of this scourge, for which she does not put figures at the moment. He does not rule out, however, starting new studies and investigations to corroborate or refute the numbers provided by the Ombudsman's report. "If it's 200,000, 300,000 or 400,000, we'll find out," he said.
