Spain’s Catholic bishops have apologised again for sex abuses committed by church members following a recent report by Spain’s Ombudsman that accused the church of widespread negligence. ALSO READ: Up to 440,000 victims of child abuse in Spanish church, Ombudsman reports.
However, the bishops dismissed as ‘a lie’ media interpretations of the official report that put the number of victims involving the church in the hundreds of thousands. They said this was misrepresentative given that many more people had been abused outside of the church.
‘I reiterate the petition for pardon to the victims for this pain,’ the president of the Spain’s Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Juan José Omella, told a press briefing.
He added that the church would continue working ‘together on the comprehensive reparation of the victims, on supporting them and deepening the path to their protection and, above all, the prevention of abuse’.
The bishops said the church would contribute to any economic reparation programme once it included all victims of child sexual abuse, not just those abused within the church itself.
The briefing was called to evaluate the Ombudsman’s report released on Friday that said the church’s response had often been to minimise if not deny the problem.
The report acknowledged that the church had taken steps to address both abuse by priests and efforts to cover up the scandal, but said they were not enough.
Included in the report was a survey based on 8,000 valid phone and online responses. The poll found that 1.13% of the Spanish adults questioned said they were abused as children either by priests or lay members of the church, including teachers at religious schools. The poll said 0.6% identified their abusers as clergy members.
Ombudsman Ángel Gabilondo did not extrapolate from the survey, but given that Spain’s adult population stands close to 39 million, 1.13% would mean some 440,000 minors could have been sexually abused by Roman Catholic priests, members of a religious order or lay members of the church in recent decades.
Omella, however, said the media’s extrapolation of the survey results ‘does not correspond to the truth’. The church maintained that going by the survey’s figures, some 4 million Spaniards, or 11.7 % of the adult population, may have been abused as minors in all, a figure it considered to be ‘barbaric’, suggesting it was not credible.
The survey conducted by GAD3, a well-known opinion pollster in Spain, had a margin of sampling error for all respondents of plus or minus 1.1 percentage points.
.@MonsGarciaMagan recalca que los obispos se unen a la petición de @DefensorPuebloE para poner en marcha sus recomendaciones. pic.twitter.com/gTZ5kVe5lV
— Of. Información CEE (@prensaCEE) October 31, 2023
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