In 2018, EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church and has an updated database of all known cases. If you are aware of any cases that have not been reported, please write to us at: abusos@elpais.es. If the case is in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.
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Clerical pedophilia was Pope Francis’ most difficult battle during his 12-year pontificate, and although he personally committed himself to it, often making radical decisions, the rest of the hierarchy — the bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy — did not always support him. He issued regulations, always delivered harsh speeches, and exuded humanity in his encounters with victims, but the thorough cleansing and acceptance of the truth, the effective implementation of his reforms, did not depend solely on him.
Francis moved in fits and starts, but there is still much to do; he was unable to handle everything alone. A common criticism from victims’ associations around the world is that this has been an era of fine words and many measures, but little progress. In the uneven balance of this battle, the case of Spain is significant: the Pope always looked the other way. Despite the investigation by EL PAÍS, which has already revealed hundreds of cases, Francis decided to delegate management of the problem to the Spanish Church and not confront it. The result has been years of denial, inaction, and opacity, with little or no progress.
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the Chair of St. Peter in March 2013, he continued the line of his predecessor, Benedict XVI; no obvious about-face was noticed. He assumed the Church had already reacted. Indeed, one of his first decisions was to reject the U.N.’s request that year to remove “from their posts and hand over to the police all those found guilty of sexual abuse of minors.” Francis resisted. “The responsibility lies with the judicial system,” the Holy See responded.
The Argentine pope had many open fronts, and among all the reforms he implemented, he decided in March 2014 to create an ad hoc body, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. However, over the years, it has contributed little and has gone through moments of crisis itself, with open criticism from some members regarding its ineffectiveness and denunciations of internal difficulties. The commission took almost 10 years to produce its first report, presented in October 2024, without impact figures or critical assessments of already known problems.
It took five years for anything to change, due to a first personal experience with the scandal that altered the Pope’s position: the abuse cases in Chile. During his January 2018 trip to Chile and Peru, along with a heated welcome in Santiago, he also encountered protests from a group of victims attacking the bishop of the city of Osorno, accused of covering up pedophiles.
The victims of the sexual assaults by priest Fernando Karadima received a terse response from the Pope: “There is not a single piece of evidence against him.” But that episode stirred him inside, especially after meeting with some of the victims, an experience that deeply moved him. He also realized that the information he was receiving from the bishops was unreliable. He then ordered his own investigation into the case by two of his most trusted men, the Bishop of Malta, Charles Scicluna, and the Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeu. The outcome of their report was devastating, forcing the Pope to acknowledge in a letter to the Chilean community that he had “made serious errors of judgment.” He summoned all of Chile’s bishops to the Vatican and forced them to resign en masse in June 2018.
After the Chilean Church’s hecatomb, the scandal seemed to spill over, with new cases in other countries, from Germany to Australia, sometimes accusing prominent figures, such as Cardinal and Archbishop Emeritus of Washington Theodor McCarrick, who was eventually expelled. The French Episcopal Conference also announced the launch of a major independent investigation, which concluded in 2021 with a report citing more than 330,000 cases.
Similarly, the scandal began to emerge in Spain, thanks to a report by EL PAÍS. In October 2018, this newspaper launched an investigation that, in its first article, counted only 34 convictions for ecclesiastical pedophilia in the previous 30 years. Today, this newspaper’s database, the only one in Spain that tracks the phenomenon, lists 1,550 accused and 2,870 victims. These figures were obtained with little cooperation from the Spanish Church, which denied the problem and replied that there were “few cases.”
Faced with an avalanche of cases worldwide, in 2018 Francis thanked the press for their work, called the Church hierarchy, which looked the other way, “wolves” and convened bishops from around the world to a summit at the Vatican dedicated exclusively to pedophilia.
In February 2019, the Pontiff approved a major reform of canon law, a motu proprio called Vos estis lux mundi, which required investigations of pedophile clerics upon knowledge of any clue, even delivered anonymously, or reports in the press. Until then, for the Church, victims who appeared in the media did not exist, only if they went to a bishop or the superior of a religious order.
Francis also opened avenues for reparation for those affected and included cover-ups as a serious crime. In 2019, the Vatican published a vademecum with rules for handling cases, required each diocese to open victim assistance offices, and lifted the papal secrecy surrounding these crimes.
In Spain, however, the Church resisted investigating past cases and revealing what it knew. Even at the beginning of 2021, the Episcopal Conference (CEE) was still maintaining that there were “zero or very few cases” in Spain. By then, this newspaper had already counted 243 accused and at least 550 victims.
Francis did not comment on what was happening in Spain until the Vatican finally issued a brief statement in support of the Spanish victims, when in December 2021 EL PAÍS handed the Pope a report with 251 previously unpublished cases. The impact of this work led the Spanish parliament to commission an independent investigation by the Ombudsman, and the Episcopal Conference was finally forced to undertake its own investigation: although it always said it would never do so, it commissioned an audit from a law firm.
This newspaper submitted four more reports in the following years, with a total of 783 accounts in more than 1,600 pages. The Vatican has never responded to this, delegating everything to a Spanish Church that, today, has nearly 70 bishops and religious superiors accused of covering up or silencing cases.
The Pope did not even react in 2023 to the survey in the Ombudsman’s report, which estimated the percentage of abuse victims in the Spanish Church at 1.13% of the entire population, equivalent to about 440,000 people, according to media estimates. It was a strange silence, considering his criticism of the handling of the scandal following similar studies and reports in countries such as the United States, France, Portugal, and Italy.
What is known about the scandal is, in reality, the tip of the iceberg, according to experts, and the Church has continued to move with its usual reluctance and opacity. In each diocese, the bishops continue to do as they please, and when complaints reach Rome, they get bogged down in bureaucracy.
Francis achieved occasional changes, through sporadic impulses, and often nothing happened if victims or journalists managed to interview him and tell him their story. An example is the Gaztelueta case, an Opus Dei school in Biscay in the Basque Country, which was canonically closed despite the Supreme Court’s condemnation of the accused teacher. However, after speaking with the victim, Francis ordered it reopened, resulting in the expulsion of the pedophile.
The same thing happened with the case of the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana, a powerful ultraconservative organization in Peru. The first complaints were filed in 2001, then more reached the Archbishopric of Lima in 2011. In 2015, the scandal erupted via a book written by two journalists, Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, but still no action was taken until the two reporters went to Rome to see Francis in person in 2022, to tell him personally what was happening.
Then the Pope again commissioned Scicluna and Bertomeu to conduct their own investigation. In less than three years, the Sodalicio was dissolved, this very month. But if the journalists hadn’t gone to see the Pope, perhaps nothing would have happened. Thousands of victims around the world haven’t been that lucky, and are still waiting for an answer.
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