More than 200,000 minors are estimated to have been sexually abused in Spain by the Roman Catholic clergy since 1940, according to an independent commission published on Friday.
The report did not give a specific figure, but said that a poll of more than 8,000 people found that 0.6 percent of Spain’s adult population of about 39 million people said they had been sexually abused by members of the clergy when they were children.
The percentage rose to 1.13 percent — or more than 400,000 people — when including abuse by lay members, Spanish Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo told a news conference called to present the findings of the report which has more than 700 pages.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The revelations in Spain are the latest to rock the Roman Catholic Church after a series of sexual abuse scandals around the world over the past 20 years.
The commission also interviewed 487 victims, who stressed “the emotional problems” the abuse has caused them, Gabilondo said.
“There are people who have [died by] suicide ... people who have never put their lives back together,” the former education minister said.
Teresa Conde, a philosophy teacher who was abused for years by a friar starting at the age of 14 when she attended a religious school in the northwestern city of Salamanca in the early 1980, said she is “never going to be a normal person.”
“I’m never going to stop doing therapy or taking medicine,” the 57-year-old said.
Unlike in other nations, in Spain — a traditionally Catholic country that has become highly secular — clerical abuse allegations only recently started to gain traction, leading to accusations by survivors of stonewalling.
The report is critical of the response of the Catholic Church, saying “it has long been characterized by denial and attempts to downplay the issue.”
It recommended that a state fund be created to pay reparations to the victims.
“Unfortunately, for many years there has been a certain desire to deny abuses or a desire to conceal or protect the abusers,” Gabilondo said.
Spain’s parliament in March last year overwhelmingly approved the creation of an independent commission led by the country’s ombudsman to look into clerical abuse.
The country’s Catholic Church, which for years flatly refused to carry out its own probe, declined to take part in the probe, although it did cooperate by providing documents on cases of sexual abuse that had been collected by dioceses.
However, as political pressure mounted, it tasked a private law firm in February last year with an “audit” into past and present sexual abuse by clergy, teachers and others associated with the church, which should be completed by the end of the year.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the release of the report was a “milestone” in the country’s democratic history.
“Today we are a slightly better country, because a reality that everyone was for years aware of but no one talked about, has been made known,” he told reporters in Brussels.
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