Spanish Jesuits recognize decades of sexual abuse

The first comprehensive investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by a religious order Spain has identified 81 minors and 37 adult victims of abuse committed by 96 Jesuits, a number far higher than the cases publicly known to date.

Victims’ associations praised the disclosure but criticized the failure to disclose the names of the abusers or their accessories. They also want criminal proceedings against the few surviving abusers and a detailed victim compensation plan.

“It’s a timid measure going in the right direction, but it falls short,” Stolen Childhood Association spokesman Miguel Hurtado told The Associated Press Friday.

The Jesuits are members of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic order founded in 1540 by Ignacio Loyola. According to the website, the order operates 68 schools with about 75,000 students in Spain, half a dozen universities and other higher education centers.

The Society of Jesus in Spain said in its report published Thursday that the internal investigation confirmed that 96 members had been charged with sexual abuse since 1927, the year of the first recorded case. The victims of 65 Jesuits were minors. However, the report highlights that the defendants make up just 1% of the 8,782 members admitted to the order in the past 93 years.

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, has sought to raise awareness of the problem of ecclesiastical abuse in the Church around the world and passed laws to hold members of the hierarchy who are covering it up.

As with other religious orders specializing in education, the report shows that Jesuit schools became rich hunting grounds for predatory priests, yielding constant casualties. Most of the abuses took place in or related to schools, the Jesuits said.

Only 17 of the child molesters are still alive, and of these, the 13 who remain attached to the warrant have been punished or awaiting the results of criminal or internal investigations and all have been moved to positions without contact with children, the report said.

The recorded cases stem from complaints, eyewitness accounts and journalistic reports and range from improper statements to wrongdoing and violations.

Spanish newspaper El País said that in its investigation of clergy sexual abuse cases since 1986, only eight of the 123 alleged perpetrators were Jesuits until the warrant’s report was released. The revelation, the paper says, “is a piece of information that is being called out to burst the few known statistics on child abuse in the Spanish Catholic Church.”

The report states that there are 19 cases of “rumors” where no evidence has been found that would allow credible complaints to be filed and that 15 of the accused Jesuits were acquitted.

Recognition of the Spanish Jesuits is important, as the religious orders in general have escaped criminal investigations, national investigations, and voluntary sexual abuse disclosures, which mostly target the priests of the dioceses.

Some religious orders in the United States have been forced to release information about predators in their ranks as part of civil lawsuits or bankruptcy proceedings. Others have done this voluntarily, albeit under pressure after the most recent outbreak of the scandal in the United States in 2018, but many warrants have managed to hide that information, and outside the United States, disclosures by warrant are extremely rare.

The great religious orders operate in many ways outside the diocesan structure of the Catholic hierarchy and answer to their own superiors, who in turn are directly answerable to the Vatican. For this reason, they are usually not subject to the standards or recommendations of their national bishops’ conferences, which have sought to contain the problem in recent years, but few outside the United States agree to publish the names of the accused priests.

For Hurtado – himself a victim of assault when he was a member of a Catholic youth group in northeastern Spain – identification of the perpetrators is necessary because for years the hierarchy has hidden the accused clergy, transferred them from dioceses or parishes or even sent them into the abroad as missionaries.

Again, the report suggests that the abuses were caused by chance, bad luck, not as a result of decades of institutional cover-up, the activist said.

The Jesuits presented their findings after a two-year internal investigation as an act of remorse. They recognized that it is a “limited study” and that “the realities of past abuse have not been sufficiently addressed, which has contributed to the generation of more pain”.

“Our goal is to create a safe environment in our works and duties and a fundamental part of this is accountability for the past,” said Antonio España, Provincial Superior of the Jesuits.

Under a new plan to make its churches and schools “safe environments for minors and vulnerable people,” the order said it had increased the training of its clergy and employees to prevent abuse, while creating a space where potential victims could hear your complaints. can present.

They have also developed standards to respond to suspected cases as part of “a profound culture shift,” the Jesuits said.

The warrant acknowledges, unusually, that it provided financial or therapy assistance in some cases, although it said it does not consider this to be legal compensation.

The Society of Jesus said it is developing a recovery protocol in accordance with Spanish law.

“We don’t understand by any means that compensation erases suffering, but we want to provide an answer where possible,” he said.

In the United States, in 2011, the Northwestern part of the Jesuits paid the largest compensation to date, $ 166 million to 500 victims, many of them from indigenous peoples who were raped and abused in remote schools and parishes of the United States. Jesuits in Alaska.