Barcelona: Spain’s government and the country’s Catholic bishops agreed Thursday to a joint plan to compensate victims of sexual abuse by clergy members who have died or whose possible crimes have been proscribed.
The agreement aimed to resolve discrepancies between the left-wing government and church authorities over the question of reparations for abuse victims in the once staunchly Catholic country, which has secularised in recent decades.
The Spanish Episcopal Conference, run by the bishops, said in a statement that the new agreement will allow victims who don’t want to seek help directly from the church to turn to the government and the state’s ombudsman, who has taken a lead role in shedding light on abuse. Spain’s Justice Minister Felix Bolanos said in a press conference in Madrid that “hundreds” of victims whose aggressors had passed away or were now very old could finally receive recognition of the abuse and receive economic reparations paid by the church.
“Today, we have paid a debt to the victims,” Bolanos said. “It is true that the State has acted late, but we are acting now. Yesterday, the victims couldn’t do anything because these crimes had proscribed.” Only in the past decade has Spain begun to face the question of sexual abuse by the priesthood and other church members, mainly thanks to the initial reporting by the newspaper El Pais.
In 2023, Spain’s ombudsman delivered a damning 800-page report that investigated 487 known cases of sexual abuse and included a survey that calculated the number of possible victims could reach the hundreds of thousands.
Spain’s bishops strongly refuted that estimate by the ombudsman, saying their own investigation had uncovered 728 sexual abusers within the church since 1945. It said that most of the crimes had occurred before 1990 and that 60% of the aggressors were now dead.