Priestly celibacy and sexual abuseOn the Ombudsman's report"We are all called to know the impact of abuse," pope saysThis morning the Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, appeared in the Congress of Deputies before the Joint Committee on Relations with the Ombudsman to present in Parliament the ".Report on sexual abuse within the Catholic Church".
Almost everyone has been taken by surprise by this meeting, since it was a year ago, specifically on October 27, 2023 when Gabilondo and Francina Armengol, president of the Congress of Deputies, staged the delivery of the report with a staging in style.
The political and ideological use that some parties and the media are making of the abuses committed by members of the Church has escaped no one's notice. While Christian institutions are constantly criticized, the protection of minors in other areas is almost completely neglected.
Data for context
Let us consider some points to keep in mind in order to assess the extent of sexual abuse of minors in Spain:
1. The fifth report presented by El País on abuses in Spain last May, the percentage of accused clergymen is 1.3% of the total clergy. This is a very significant figure, since in the investigations carried out in the rest of the countries this percentage has always been between 4% and 7%.
Precisely because the data for Spain were far from those of the rest of the countries, Gabilondo let slip at the press conference to present the report that a telephone survey said that 1.13% of those surveyed claimed to have suffered an aggression in the religious sphere. If that figure were true, there would be 440,000 victims in Spain, which would mean that every Spanish priest or religious without exception would have had to abuse several victims.
However, the constant appearance of ecclesiastical abuses in the press makes one think that what has happened in Spain is equal to or greater than what has happened elsewhere. However, one could also look at the issue in another way and ask why Spanish clerics have abused two-thirds less than clerics in any other country.
2. The Ombudsman's abuse report found 600 cases of abuse over the past 70 years. However, only 27 of them belonged to the 21st century. Considering that in the last decade the number of reports of sexual abuse of minors has multiplied exponentially, it is safe to say that the ecclesial context is one of the safest environments for minors.
State Attorney General's Office
3. It is undeniable that in Spain there have been abuses and cover-ups by the Church, but it is also undeniable that, according to the latest available data, only 0.45% of the current reports of sexual abuse of minors belong to the Church (and this figure includes lay people and religious who work in educational and catechetical fields). And who offers this data? Nothing more and nothing less than the State Attorney General's OfficeOf the 15,000 open cases in 2022, only 68 belong to the Church.
Confidence in the Church
4. Despite the fact that the mantra of abuse is constantly grabbing headlines and prime time television, the Catholic Church continues to generate enormous confidence among parents, as shown by the fact that there are 2,500 Catholic schools in Spain. They educate 1.5 million children and adolescents and would be much more if the state did not try to financially stifle the subsidized schools by offering them 25% less funding than public schools.
Politicians
5. A large part of the press and politicians do not seem to really care about the victims, since they are only interested in investigating abuses in the ecclesiastical sphere, forgetting 99.5% of the cases. And it should not be forgotten that the Spanish parliament commissioned the Ombudsman to investigate abuses in the Church, but voted against extending it to other areas, which is a disgrace for democracy. The silence of El País on this point clearly reflects the little interest it has for the victims of abuse and the great determination it has to denigrate the Church.
The case of the Spanish parliament is not the only dereliction of duty we have seen in our country. The concealment of pederasty by political parties seems to be commonplace. It was the votes of the PSOE, Podemos and Compromís that prevented them from being investigated the abuse of a minor in a center run by the Valencian Regional Government in 2020. The reason? The accused was none other than the husband of Monica Oltra, vice president of the Valencian government.
The governments of PSOE, Més and Unidas Podemos were also the ones that voted against the creation of a commission to investigate the sexual exploitation of two girls under the guardianship of the Consell de Menorca. As if this were not enough, the current president of the Spanish Parliament, Francina Armengol, was responsible for torpedoing this process. Later on, the PSOE prevented the European Parliament to investigate the matter on his own.
Press
As can be seen in all these cases it is quite ironic and unfair for the government or parliaments to boast of their work on behalf of the victims of abuse and pretend to have any moral legitimacy in this process. The same can be said of many media outlets that tiptoed around the issue and did not demand a tenth as much accountability as they did from the Church.
6. This year, a group of anonymous citizens who call themselves the Sergio Gámez collective, demonstrated that both the "investigation" of El País and that of the Ombudsman, did not thoroughly investigate the complaints they received in their e-mail, cancelling the presumption of innocence of all the accused.
In conclusion, the moral superiority shown by many politicians and the media in accusing the Church of its sins and forgetting the beam in the eye that prevents them from seeing their own responsibility is totally unfounded.
The responsibility of the cultural left
7. The driving forces behind the legalization and social acceptance of pedophilia in Europe were leftist intellectuals, considered by many as the masters of Western thought. Starting with the Nobel Prize winner Jean-Paul Sartre, continuing with his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, and passing through Michel Foucault, and many others... In fact, in 1977, 62 intellectuals signed a manifesto demanding the decriminalization of pedophilia in France. They wanted it to be considered a normal stage of development in a child's life.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the German and French Greens, wrote a book, "Le grand Bazaar", in which he openly presented himself as a pedophile. Between 1994 and 2014 he was an MEP, but we will not find major denunciations among the media of a certain tendency.
Pedophile writers
Another example. Gabriel Matzneff, a famed French writer, was harshly cancelled in 2020 when the French "me too" put the cry in the sky when it became known from his works the pedophile life he led. Now, the harsh public rebuke has not reached the rest of the authors of his generation, starting with Foucault, who enjoyed a pedophile life at full throttle in Tunisia. Today, however, the same accountability will not be demanded from the media, or from the universities that happily disseminated and protected his work and legacy. And yet the views of these thinkers were openly known.
And while the Church at that time was accused of being against the happiness of minors because it was against sexual contact with children, now it is vilified to the extreme for its cover-ups. Shouldn't the same yardstick be used with the media and politicians, then and now, who supported those intellectuals? Is there only room for accountability for some?
This is what the Spanish Ombudsman seems to be proposing, when a few hours ago he insisted that the recommendations of his report be implemented, but forgot to remind the deputies that more than 99% of the victims also need justice.
(Article updated on 16-10-2024).
Editor of Omnes. Previously he has collaborated in various religious and cultural media. He has been a high school philosophy teacher for 18 years.
