Between the years 1970 and 2020, that is, within 50 years, more than 400 thousand Spanish citizens have suffered sexual abuse, humiliation, or sexual assault by priests, priests, religious or lay people with an organic connection to the Church.
The Spanish Ombudsman, led by the academic and philosopher Ángel Gabilondo, of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), presented a historic 770-page report to the Congress of Deputies, which recounted the horror of a day-to-day truth. where most of the victims are children and teenagers of both sexes, although the victims have more than 68 percent of the male sex.
The report (which can be read in full at this link: https://www.defensordelpueblo.es/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/INFORME_abusos_Iglesia_catolica.pdf) is a glimpse into the catalog of horrors of sexual and authority abuse on the part of priests, priests and religious in Spain, which according to this document has become the country in the world with the most registered cases of this type of crime, ahead of countries like in Ireland, France or Portugal, where when they came to light the continuous abuses of the Church caused great social upheaval.
Therefore, the Spanish Ombudsman requested the creation of a State fund for the financial compensation of the victims and a public event to ask them for “forgiveness,” from the highest institutions of the Catholic Church and the public sphere, because of “silence” these abuses that have been going on for years.
The Ombudsman’s report is based on a survey conducted by the statistics company GAD3, which conducted a study based on more than eight thousand interviews, which concluded that 0.6 percent of those surveyed admitted to suffering from abuse of a priest or religious. But the percentage almost doubles (1.13%) when abuses “on the religious side” are included, even if they are inflicted by lay people. So the number of more than 400 thousand victims.
Gabilondo, who received the task from public institutions, delivered the document to the president of the Congress of Spain, also a socialist Francina Armengol, to ensure “restorative justice, compensation, apology and recognition of guilt” on the part of the Catholic Church. , which in recent decades has maintained a “complex silence” in front of this very serious situation, where hundreds, even thousands of people organically associated with the Catholic Church are involved.
Regarding this, Gabilondo explained that “it is not true that everyone knows. Not that anyone knew, but it was inevitable that the Catholic Church would cooperate. And I think that at this point the Church needs to know this.”
Among the many testimonies included in the report is that of a man who suffered abuse when he was only 12 years old, who for obvious reasons hid his identity and recounted: “I knocked on the door from the outside with my knuckles. , I heard a voice inside telling me to come inside. At first glance, he is an old man. I walked to the door calmly, and even excited because what our teacher said was that this person would listen to us to help us.
All expectations were distorted when this man, without even saying hello, told me: ‘Undress.’ When I felt him start caressing me, all my doubts disappeared and my worst fears started to come true. He got up and I remember his hands rubbing me. Then I felt severe pain and burning at the entrance of my anus.
He tried to insert his finger and it hurt me a lot. I stirred as much as I could and turned to look at him. At that time I didn’t understand and I touched my ass. It is wet, sticky, and very smelly. I don’t know what that is, what’s going on, and what it’s all about, but I want to get out of there. I went into absolute panic, but a suppressed, silent panic. He told me to get dressed. I didn’t look at his face, I got dressed in silence, scared. He hides it, and pretends to fill out some paper, or whatever. “I’m dead, I don’t understand anything, I don’t know what’s going on.”
