Spain’s ombudsman urges Catholic bishops to collaborate in sexual abuse investigation

The Spanish ombudsman on Tuesday said he “hasn’t noticed a lot of enthusiasm” from parts of the Catholic Church as he looks into sexual abuse cases and urged bishops to collaborate with his investigation.

“If they say they won’t, I will make very concrete requests about what happened in specific cases, congregations and what’s going on with certain archives,” Angel Gabilondo said at the New Economy Forum in Madrid.

“I know that the fundamental problem is opening archives, and I know exactly what the agreement between the church and state says about that, but I will call them because we need the collaboration of the entire society. I think, hope and wish that the Spanish Episcopal Conference isn’t going to sit on the margins of society,” he added.

Gabilondo is leading Spain’s first official investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It began in July and has identified 230 victims so far, he said.

The Spanish Episcopal Conference, an administration composed of Spain’s bishops, has said it would collaborate on specific cases but has refused to fully open its archives to the investigation.

Under a 1979 agreement between Spain and the Catholic Church, the state must respect the “inviolability” of all church documents. In effect, it means that Spanish authorities cannot legally require the church to hand over archives.

However, Spain’s ombudsman insisted that his commission isn’t “trying to persecute believers” and includes people with ties to the Catholic Church among its 17 members.

Once the investigation is complete, his commission will send a report to Spain’s parliament, where politicians will decide what comes next. “I hope it will serve to adopt new legal measures, but we aren’t conducting a trial,” he added.

Spain is one of the last predominantly Catholic countries to conduct such an investigation. In France, an investigation estimated that there were around 330,000 victims of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2020. Portugal, which began a similar probe this January, has initially identified 326 victims, though the investigators say that is “only the tip of the iceberg.”

The first major investigation in Spain was started by leading daily El Pais in 2018. So far, the newspaper has identified nearly 1,600 victims of sexual abuse in the church and 840 suspected abusers in the clergy.

During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which ended in 1975, Catholicism was the state religion of Spain and other worship services could not be advertised.

A public poll conducted in 2021 found that 55.4% of Spaniards still consider themselves Catholic. That’s still the majority but the lowest level on record, with nearly 40% of the population saying they are not believers. In the same poll in 1978, 90.5% of respondents identified as Catholic.