The Vatican has announced an investigation into 251 allegations of sexual abuse and violence by priests and members of the Spanish Church in El Pais.
According to Pak Sahafat news agency on Monday, El Pais newspaper wrote in a report: The church has conducted an unprecedented large-scale investigation into 251 priests and members of churches and religious institutions accused of raping minors that El Pais has collected and researched over the past three years.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement that the pope had received the documents and that the investigation would “proceed in accordance with current customary law, which has been duly updated in recent years”.
The 385-page report, which was handed over directly to Pope Francis during a December 2 trip to Greece by an El Pais reporter, the charges and testimonies are related to the facts that took place between 1943 and 2018.”
The Conference of Bishops of Spain, in a statement issued on Sunday, in turn “expressed its interest and willingness to investigate all cases of abuse” and encouraged all victims to file a complaint. A spokesman for the Spanish Bishops’ Conference said that since 2001, the Vatican has received 220 complaints of sexual violence in the Spanish Church. The Spanish newspaper writes that “in the last three years it has received more than 600 e-mail complaints”.
The report by El Pais, which is openly critical of the statistics of the Conference of Bishops of Spain, states: The El Pais report in three years is beyond the conference statistics in 20 years. A statistic that goes even further.
According to El Pais, the oldest item in this report is from 1943 and the newest is from 2018. If we add 251 new cases to the previous ones based on our data provided in the absence of official statistics, the number of cases of abuse, violence and ill-treatment of church members will reach at least 602. Also, since the 1930s, 1,237 people have been killed, which is based on strict criteria and only the direct testimony of injured people and witnesses.
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In recent years, reports of church scandals involving child abuse, abuse, and sexual violence have become increasingly commonplace in Europe.
According to Deutsche Welle, a report by the Independent Commission of Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in French Catholic Churches, between 1950 and 2020, a total of 330,000 cases of sexual violence occurred in the country’s churches.
In its latest report on child sexual abuse, the Polish Catholic Church accused 292 of its affiliated members of abusing 368 underage girls and boys from 2018 to 2020.
In 2018, at the request of the Vatican, an investigation was conducted into the possibility of sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church. The study found that between 1948 and 2014, more than 3,600 children were sexually assaulted or abused by Catholic priests.