An foundation says a legendary French priest and a lifelong advocate of the homeless has been accused of committing acts that would amount to “sexual assault or sexual harassment.”
By BARBARA SURK
A legendary French priest and a lifelong advocate of the homeless has been accused of committing acts that would amount to “sexual assault or sexual harassment,” his foundation said Wednesday, in the latest instance of a Catholic spiritual leader facing allegations of abusing his power to harm women.
Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007, was one of France’s most beloved public figures. The founder of the international Emmaus Community for the poor, Abbé Pierre had served as part of France’s conscience since the 1950s, when he persuaded Parliament to pass a law — still on the books — forbidding landlords to evict tenants during winter.
Several women have accused the late priest of sexual assault or harassment between the end of the 1970s and 2005, his foundation said in a statement. It explained that it is making public the allegations of seven women, including one who was a minor at the time, after reviewing the report of an expert firm that specializes in violence prevention and was commissioned to listen to women’s testimonies and analyze them.
The women reported unsolicited kissing and touching, as well as inappropriate sexual comments and propositions, according to the report from the Groupe Egaé firm.
“The Emmaus Community is making public the acts that may amount to sexual assault or sexual harassment, committed by Abbé Pierre,” the statement said. It added that several other women had “suffered comparable acts” of sexual abuse but were unable to be heard. Some had died, some could not be contacted and others declined to be interviewed.
The alleged victims were employees, volunteers with the foundation or some of its member organizations, or young women in Abbé Pierre’s personal entourage, the statement said.
The foundation has set up a confidential system for other potential victims to come forward, for “collecting testimonies and providing support to people who were victims of or witnessed unacceptable behavior on the part of Abbé Pierre,” the statement said.
The Vatican doesn’t usually comment on individual cases of alleged abuse and didn’t immediately respond when asked about Abbé Pierre.
In 2021, an independent commission on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church estimated that some 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by priests or other church-related figures in France.
The allegations against Abbé Pierre are the latest in a series of cases of Catholic spiritual giants accused of abusing their power and authority to take sexual advantage of the women under their spiritual sway.
France has recently had to contend with revelations about another beloved 20th century Catholic figure, Jean Vanier, who founded the L’Arche federation in the 1960s to care for people with intellectual disabilities. Recently, L’Arche commissioned investigations that found the late Vanier perverted Catholic doctrine about Jesus and Mary to justify his sexual compulsions to abuse women.
Prior to that were revelations of serial sexual abuse of adults in religious communities founded by two French brothers, the Rev. Thomas Philippe and Rev. Marie-Dominique Philippe, called L’Eau Vive and Community of Saint Jean, respectively. Thomas Philippe was a spiritual father to Vanier and allegedly initiated Vanier into his mystical-sexual practices at L’Eau Vive.
More recently, the Vatican and the Jesuit religious order have been contending with the scandal over the famous ex-Jesuit artist, Rev. Marko Rupnik, who has been accused by more than 20 women of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuse going back decades.
The Vatican reopened the Rupnik case after an international outcry that the priest, whose mosaics decorate basilicas and shrines around the world, received favorable treatment from the Jesuits including Pope Francis. Rupnik hasn’t responded to the allegations, but the Jesuits kicked him out of the order last year after finding the women’s claims were “very highly credible.”
“Allegation after allegation, secular investigation after another clearly shows that no institution knew more and no institution has done less to help victims,” said Mike McDonnell, communications director of the U.S.-based clergy abuse survivor group SNAP. “We can’t help but think about the victims who have yet to come forward.”
The Vatican has long refused to take action against charismatic spiritual leaders abusing their power to sexually harm women, making a clear distinction between abuse of minors and adults. The church has long insisted that any sexual activity between a priest and an adult woman is sinful but consensual, and has tended to blame the woman for seducing an otherwise holy priest.
The church has had to rethink that dynamic in the #MeToo era and acknowledge that free consent may not be possible given the imbalanced power differentials between priest and parishioner or nun.
— Anthony Odiong, prohibited from ministering in Texas and Louisiana amid criminal investigation, arrested in Florida
Anthony Odiong delivering a homily in which he refers to members of the LGBTQ+ community as ‘monkeys and animals and chimpanzees’, in November 2023. Photograph: St Anthony of Padua church of Luling
A Catholic priest under criminal investigation for sexual misconduct with multiple women – and consequently prohibited from ministering in two states – has been charged with illegally possessing child abuse imagery depicting girls.
Anthony Odiong was arrested Tuesday as he was leaving his home in Ave Maria, Florida, on a warrant obtained by police in Waco, Texas, charging him with possessing child abuse images showing disrobed children. According to sworn statements in support of the arrest warrant that were obtained by the Guardian, police said they discovered the illicit pictures while investigating complaints from at least four women that made officers aware Odiong, 55, could be “a potential serial sexual assault suspect”.
The Waco police statements say that at least some of the women’s complaints are too old to prosecute due to statutes of limitation. But the police said statutes of limitation in Texas are irrelevant if “probable cause exists to believe that the defendant has committed the same or similar sex offense against five or more victims”. And they have asked anyone with information about Odiong to contact them as they weigh the possibility of charging him with the women’s complaints.
Odiong drew media scrutiny that eventually landed him on the police’s radar in February, when the Roman Catholic diocese of Austin – which administers Waco’s church institutions – revealed he was removed of his ability to minister there in 2019.
That revelation came nearly two months after Louisiana’s most important diocese had similarly suspended him. The suspensions stemmed from complaints by women – including two he encountered while they were at the Baylor University campus in Waco – who publicly accused Odiong of trying to use his influence as a priest to pursue sexual contact they either did not welcome or could not consent to participating in.
Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida on Tuesday.
Texas is one of about a dozen states with a law that says it is impossible for there to be a consensual relationship between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice.
And in March, less than a month after the Guardian published a report detailing how the prior allegations against him ranged from sexual coercion and groping to fiscal abuse, an unidentified person walked into the Waco police department and accused Odiong of sexually assaulting her in 2012.
Police subsequently secured judicial permission to access an email account belonging to Odiong and found messages from another woman who had never come forward explicitly detailing sexual encounters with the priest, including one where her colon was injured.
Investigators later spoke with the woman, who “came forward to admit that” she had met Odiong under “the same circumstances” and been subjected to some of the behavior his prior accusers had, according to the police’s sworn statements.
From there, a judge permitted police to search Odiong’s iCloud online data storage account. Waco police detective Bradley DeLange later wrote under oath that he “discovered images depicting a clearly prepubescent child”, which had been saved to the account in September 2020.
DeLange said there were also “two images of what is believed to be [another] child” with what appears to be an adult touching an unclothed body part.
While none of the images show the face of a child, DeLange said it was evident that at least some of the images displayed someone “under 10 years of age which … may enhance the eligible punishment that may be assessed”.
McClennan county, Texas, judge Thomas C West on 5 July signed off on DeLange’s request for a warrant to arrest Odiong in connection with the child abuse imagery, records show. The judge’s suggested bail was $1m.
Attempts to contact an attorney who has previously represented Odiong was not immediately successful.
Kristi Schubert, an attorney for most of the women who have spoken out against Odiong, said she hopes the cleric’s arrest convinces “Catholic leaders that priests who sexually abuse adults can no longer be given a free pass”.
“A predator is a predator,” Schubert said. “And if they will sexually exploit an adult, they aren’t safe around children either.”
It was not immediately clear when Odiong – who was clad in clerical garb at the time of his arrest – may be transferred to the custody of Waco police from Immokalee. He would be sentenced to at least 15 years in prison if eventually convicted of possessing child abuse imagery depicting a minor younger than 10.
Revival of questions
The charges against Odiong are almost certain to revive questions about the way Catholic church bureaucrats have managed his career, which began with his ordination in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993.
When it suspended him from ministry in 2019, the Austin diocese did not disclose that move to the public – but later the organization assured congregants that it had provided notification to Catholic church leaders in south-east Louisiana, where Odiong was allowed to work until this past December.
That’s when the New Orleans archdiocese declared that it had banned Odiong from ministering in its community, too. The archdiocese emphasized at the time that the allegations against Odiong exclusively involved adults – since May 2020, the institution has been in federal bankruptcy court trying to dispense of a mound of litigation associated with a decades-old clergy child molestation scandal.
The decision to remove Odiong from New Orleans’s archdiocese was the responsibility of the city’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond. As bishop of Austin in an earlier assignment, Aymond had invited Odiong to minister there beginning in 2006.
Aymond later became archbishop of New Orleans, and he invited Odiong to work there as well.
Over the years in Texas and Louisiana, Odiong was tasked with working at a church in Luling, Louisiana, south-west of New Orleans, as well as the St Peter Catholic Student Center – which is on Baylor’s outskirts and ministers to students of that university as well as McLennan community college.
Odiong was able to build a loyal following in the US in large part by claiming he had a special understanding with the Virgin Mary through prayer. The charismatic clergyman would hold so-called healing masses after which some parishioners reported recovering from major medical ailments, improving church attendance as well as boosting his popularity with both congregants and diocesan officials.
But cracks in the public image Odiong fostered began to form when one woman whom he encountered at Baylor reported him for making an unwanted sexual advance toward her shortly after she emerged from the sacrament of confession.
A second woman whom Odiong met at Baylor then recounted how he pressured her to leave her troubled marriage and enter into a “spiritual marriage” with him, at one point forcefully kissing her on the mouth and groping her.
A third woman from Pennsylvania who met Odiong while he studied for a master’s degree in theology from Franciscan University in Ohio alleged that he coerced her into an abusive, cross-state relationship from 2007 through 2018.
She said Odiong forced her to perform oral sex on him as well as give him significant sums of money. She said she could not consent to sexual activity with Odiong – or willingly give him money – because he was her spiritual adviser.
Those three women eventually told their stories to the Guardian as well as various church and law enforcement officials. In particular, the third of those women sought damages from New Orleans’s archdiocese through its bankruptcy proceedings in 2021 while also reporting him to the sheriff’s office which patrols Luling.
A sheriff’s office report obtained by the Guardian explains that the New Orleans archdiocese’s general counsel, Susan Zeringue, claimed she was not even given the complaint in question to investigate until this past December. The sheriff’s office ultimately concluded that there was not enough evidence to establish that a crime had occurred.
Notably, unlike Texas, Louisiana does not automatically criminalize sexual contact between a clergyman and an adult parishioner – in the way it does, respectively, between teachers and students of age as well as corrections officers and incarcerated grown-ups, given the inherently imbalanced power dynamics at play.
Nonetheless, at that point, the New Orleans archdiocese revoked permission to minister in its region from Odiong – who, like all Catholic priests, had promised to remain celibate. And that expulsion garnered enough media attention to trigger the Waco police investigation which led to his arrest.
Waco police have since sworn that Odiong would inflict sexually abusive acts against his accusers during private masses he celebrated with them or in sessions dedicated to spiritual counseling – all while “wearing priest wardrobe items”. He would then communicate constantly with his accusers over email, Facebook and text messages, Waco police said in documents.
‘All things shall be revealed’
The case against Odiong is among multiple pending criminal matters with links to New Orleans’ archdiocese.
A prominent one centers on a search warrant that Louisiana state police served on the archdiocese in April as part of an investigation into whether the institution and its leaders had operated as a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
Whether Odiong’s arrest attracts much interest from the Louisiana state troopers investigating the archdiocese with which he most recently worked remains to be seen.
But what Odiong has already made known is his defiance to the allegations against him.
Odiong told his followers that Austin and New Orleans church officials had run him out over his opposition to Pope Francis’s attempts to be more welcoming to LGBTQ+ people, who are not allowed to marry within the Catholic church.
He also apparently ignored orders to return to his home diocese of Uyo and openly boasted about having plans to work at a Catholic university whose campus is about one mile away from the $400,000 home outside of which Odiong was arrested.
His most recent Facebook post was an open letter in which he accused the Guardian of carrying out “a false, salacious, one-sided smear campaign” against him. He also said he looked forward to pursuing “any and all legal remedies” to clear his name as well as to “continue to faithfully serve God’s people”.
Odiong’s post generated about 180 generally supportive comments, including one which implored Odiong to “believe, in time, all things shall be revealed, all things shall be exposed”.
After Odiong’s arrest Tuesday, Waco attorneys Christopher King and Robert Callahan reportedly announced that they would sue both the priest and the Austin diocese for damages on behalf of one of the clergyman’s accusers.
The Waco police detective investigating Odiong, DeLange, said anyone with information that may be helpful to him can reach him by telephone at (254) 750-7609.
“If you have been victimized by Anthony Odiong anywhere in the United States, we need to hear from you,” said DeLange, who assured that the privacy of any new cooperating witnesses would be protected. “You are not alone, and you do not have to continue to live with the trauma of this experience alone.”
Although credibility has been at stake since the sexual abuse crisis exploded, this is the first time a Vatican document officially admits its pervasive effects.
In Spain, the Catholic bishops announced a plan to offer reparations to victims of clergy sexual abuse, but it is not clear how they will do so.
This week the issue of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church became a priority at the global scale and even more in Spain.
At the global scale, the most recent document of the ongoing Synod, a meeting of bishops and other church officials that has happened with certain regularity in the Roman Catholic Church since the early seventies, gave prominence to the issue when it acknowledged the risk of not paying attention to the causes and consequences of clergy sexual abuse.
In the Spanish-speaking world, the Conference of Bishops of Spain heralded a plan to compensate the victims of dead predator clerics and even the victims of crimes that have already prescribed there.
If the Spanish bishops are up to the task they have set, theirs would be a first in the Spanish-speaking Catholic world, where the Catholic hierarchy has been playing, since the 1980s, a game of hide-and-seek.
The overall assumption was that the issue only existed in the English-speaking world, despite the prominence of cases such as Marcial Maciel’s in Mexico, and Carlos Miguel Buela’s in Argentina.
Not that those are the only two cases, but those are two of the most prominent cases and where it is easier to trace links between the two sexual predators and the English-speaking world.
In Maciel’s case the links between him, his order, and the U.S. and Irish hierarchy have known since the late 1990s. It was because of the work done in the United States by Jason Berry, that in the Spanish-speaking world and more precisely in Mexico, it was possible to know what was happening in the so-called Legion of Christ in the United States and in Mexico.
Maciel had used the links between the Mexican elites and their U.S. counterparts to expand the reach of his order. First, in the diocese of Rockville Centre, in the state of New York, and from there to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, and other places in that country.
Maciel was able to do so because he recruited candidates to the priesthood in Ireland, where he also set up an English language school to train his own priests, and where—already in the 1980s—he was providing services to future Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who required some command of English when he left his position as nuncio in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1988 to become John Paul II’s secretary of the Roman Curia, then in 1989 secretary for the Relations with the States of the Holy See and, finally, in 1990, secretary of State.
Benedict XVI and Carlos Miguel Buela, from the Institute of the Incarnate Word social media.
In Buela’s case the story is less known and more complex. Buela followed Maciel’s blueprint, so his Institute of the Incarnate Word entered the U.S. in a similar fashion, in the Eastern seaboard, but without the support that Maciel was able to get from rich Mexican families.
Despite that and other absences, Buela was able to target Cardinal Sodano in Rome, and the then bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y. Thomas Vose Daily and James Hickey, then archbishop and Cardinal of Washington, D.C.
Buela’s ability to settle his order in the capital of the United States, would be key to develop a relation with now disgraced and defrocked former archbishop of that city Theodore McCarrick, who helped Buela open the doors of different dioceses in the United States, and who was an active advocate of the Argentine predator priest in the Roman curia.
In exchange, Buela assigned McCarrick seminarians from his order to be their personal assistants, as the report published by the Secretary of State of the Holy See in 2020 details in pages 200 and 363 through 365.
Footnote 1114 of the report talks about how McCarrick «provided $10,000 to the Rector of the Institute of the Incarnate Word House of Formation (in Mount Rainer, Maryland) for the “expenses of the seminary” and noted that he appreciated “that I have the special privilege of enjoying the help of the seminarians of the Institute in arranging my transportation and in so many other important parts of my responsibility. I know that this comes with a price tag in purchasing gasoline and in many other ways.” »
The Vatican’s 2020 report names Buela himself for having «engaged in misconduct with adult seminarians» (p. 364). The accusations against Buela are like those against McCarrick, which only emerged later in the second decade of the 21st century, after U.S. media published detailed accounts of abuse perpetrated by McCarrick, as chapters XXVI through XXVIII of the report state (pp. 433-42).
The Synod’s acknowledgement
As far as the official working paper, the so-called Instrumentum Laboris, of the Synod, that will come to some sort of conclusion next October, the Church acknowledges that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is linked, on the one hand to a culture of “clericalism” that has been denounced repeatedly by Pope Francis himself with little or no success in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
The Synod’s document states:
«75. In our time, the demand for transparency and accountability in and by the Church has come about as a result of the loss of credibility due to financial scandals and, even more so, sexual abuse and other abuses of minors and vulnerable persons. The lack of transparency and accountability fuels clericalism, which is based on the implicit assumption that ordained ministers are accountable to no one for the exercise of the authority vested in them.
«76. If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming, then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority. However, those in positions of authority have a greater responsibility in this regard. Transparency and accountability are not limited to sexual and financial abuse. They must also be concerned with pastoral plans, methods of evangelization, and how the Church respects the dignity of the human person, for example, regarding the working conditions within its institutions».
However, far from prompting major changes, the Francis’s critique of clericalism has clashed with the idea that there is a way for the Church to resist what many clerics see as “attacks” on the institution, even if to do so they must destroy the reputation of the victims.
In recent weeks, Los Ángeles Press has published pieces comparing, on the one hand the extremely different approaches with which the Roman Catholic bishops of the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, have dealt with clergy sexual abuse in their territories.
While in El Paso, as in the rest of the United States, bishop Mark Joseph Seitz actively acknowledges the reality of clergy sexual abuse in that territory, on the other side of the fence, bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos, as most Mexican bishops, avoids acknowledging any malfeasance from his priests.
What is worse. Bishop Torres Campos uses the same repertory of chicanery and assorted legal tricks that one sees from the lawyers defending drug lords and leaders of criminal organizations in Mexico, to exculpate accused priests and even to actively discourage victims from reporting sexual abuse.
In a similar fashion, Los Ángeles Press has compared also what happens in the twelve Roman Catholic dioceses of California, United States, with the four dioceses in the Mexican Baja Californias.
What the comparison proved is that despite the alleged adherence to a similar set of principles and beliefs, the key to understand the response to clergy sexual abuse is the policymaking will of the State legislature in Sacramento, California to provide a solution to the damage brought by predator clergymen.
In contrast, on the other side of the fence, no similar approach exists in the States’ legislatures in Mexicali, Baja California, and La Paz, Baja California Sur. Quite the opposite, so the Mexican victims of clergy sexual abuse are alone in their plight.
And in that regard, Los Ángeles Press has proved how in Mexico less than half the Roman Catholic dioceses in the country have complied with the request made by Pope Francis to create in each diocese a commission to prevent, not even to solve, only to prevent, clergy sexual abuse.
Los Ángeles Press proved also how a similar pattern exist in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, with some countries, like Colombia or Peru, having a national body while other follow a model similar to Mexico of diocesan commissions to deal with the issue.
However, the most populous country in the region, Brazil, the one with the largest population of Roman Catholics worldwide, does not have neither a national body nor diocesan commissions dedicated to preventing clergy sexual abuse.
It is unclear whether the synod will see the two paragraphs already quoted as relevant enough as to issue specific recommendations or statements on the clergy sexual abuse crisis at large.
True Scale
Sadly, when dealing with the Roman Catholic Church, there is always the risk of their leaders exacerbating the alleged risk of acknowledging the true scale of the crisis.
As a consequence, it could be perfectly possible to have by November of this year some sort of boiler plate statement about the clergy sexual abuse crisis, with no real will to actually address the issue, because the bishop of some diocese alleges that “communists” or more broadly speaking “the enemies of the Church” will use it to try to destroy it.
Archbishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, nuncio to Spain.
Even in the remote case that the Synod was willing to put aside other issues during the sessions in Rome in October, there is no clarity as to when and how will the bishops of each specific country deal with the crisis.
One must keep in mind that way before the publication of the working paper, the members of the so-called Tutela Minorum, the Commission set by Pope Francis to prevent clergy sexual abuse have repeatedly stressed the negative consequences that the Church’s attitudes toward the victims have had for the Church itself.
hat is why that commission saw original members as Irish survivor Mary Collins resign their positions there, tired of the inability of the bishops and cardinals to understand the extent of the damage done by clergy sexual abuse.
No wonder there has been little or no real change in the last 40 years. The changes that have happened in the English-speaking world came as the consequence of a more thorough law enforcement and the publication of the reports commissioned by the Canadian bishops in the late 20th century, by the U.S. bishops in the early Aughts, and the findings of commissions with a degree of involvement from the governments in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.
More recently, a conscience of the true reach of the crisis have emerged because of the publication of reports in France (the so-called Sauvé Report) and Portugal, and the partial knowledge we have of what has happened in the German-speaking world.
In the German-speaking world, although there are reports released at the diocesan level in Germany, and a partial national report in Switzerland, we do not know yet the true reach of the crisis in that world.
In the Portuguese-speaking world, although the national conference of bishops in Portugal published in 2023 a report with valuable insights, we know little or nothing about the true reach of the crisis in Brazil and even less about its reach in the African Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, where there are sizeable populations of Roman Catholics.
What is worst, even if the report by Pedro Stretch, a reputed Portuguese psychiatrist, provides valuable information, the website for the report no longer exists. The original URL is under attack, and the only way to retrieve the contents, including the documents in Portuguese and English originally published in February 2023, is through the Internet Archive (available here).
If it were not for the dedication of the Internet Archive, all the contents of that website would not exist by now, because the national conference of bishops of Portugal decided that it was not worth to keep them.
Hence the significance of the announcement made on July 9th by the national conference of Catholic bishops of Spain. Sadly enough, they were less than willing to request an independent report as the one commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the John Jay College of Criminal Law (available here), or the Sauvé Report commissioned by the bishops of France.
Credibility
Back in 2022, the bishops of Spain decided that it was somehow good for their own credibility to request their first report from a lawyer’s firm specialized in corporate and private law (Cremades & Calvo Sotelo) whose main partner (Javier Cremades) is a “layperson” but who is also a member of the Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic “order” who was immediately suspect of bias by former members or sympathizers of that order, as this letter in Spanish proves.
Although the report published by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo (available here) offered nothing new, the conference of Catholic bishops of Spain dismissed the number of 1,383 victims estimated by that report.
According to a story published by El Debate (available here in Spanish) the bishops acknowledge a smaller number of victims, only 806.
However, when going over the data published by the bishops (available only in Spanish here), on the 21st of December 2023, there is no way to find that figure in the bishops’ report. The only mention of 806 as a number is the page with that number in the report.
El Debate and other media in Spain talk about a mere 205 “proven” cases; “70 unproven but credible,” and “280 unproven”. They also talk about twenty-four cases “excluded.” El Debate says that the bishops classify another seventy-five cases as “pending of resolution,” 13 more are “filed,” and three more cases are “false”.
These figures appear, however, on a separate summary of the report, available only in Spanish and only as a word document at a different URL. A PDF version of that file appears in the box immediately after this paragraph. I am unable to explain why the full report does not include these figures or how they get these numbers.
The bishops’ spokesperson Josetxo Vera, who appears in the message posted then at what used to be Twitter renders their report as a summary of data provided by the diocesan commissions in Spain, the ombudsman of Spain (Defensor del Pueblo) and by the report originally offered, at the bishops’ request, by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo.
However, the full bishops’ report states on page 343 that “is difficult to provide a closed number both of victims and of aggressors,” as can be seen here in their report titled in Spanish To illuminate (Para dar luz).
The bishops’ report cites repeatedly the report of the Spaniard ombudsman, issued back on October 27th 2023 (available here). Although this report is an official source of information, it is almost impossible to derive from it an estimation of the number of victims of clergy sexual abuse in Spain.
Magic numbers
From page 708 through 710 of the ombudsman’s report, it is possible to find the table 3.4 of the study titled “Number of victims and distribution by sex and age”. Although some dioceses as Astorga, provide a specific number of victims, others such as Albacete, Huelva, Huesca, Oviedo, and Vic, to name only a few, report no victims, dioceses such as Barcelona or Madrid, the two most populated metropolitan areas of the European country, provide only a number followed by a “V”.
The report states that the “V” stands for a “minimum number of victims” since there is no precision as to the number of total victims in that diocese. In that regard, the Archdiocese of Barcelona reports a total number of 47V, so the only thing we know for sure is that there have been at least forty-seven victims in the second largest metropolitan area of Spain.
The image that follows takes the tables as they appear, in Spanish, in the ombudsman’s report, so the reader can see what dioceses in Spain appear with a V in that table. A larger view of the table is available clicking with the right-button of your mouse on the image.
Table. Number of victims by age and sex distribution, Ombudsman of Spain.
Source: Report from the Ombudsman of Spain.
The archdiocese of Madrid reports 32V, so we know of a minimum of thirty-two victims, not an actual total number of thirty-two victims. Valencia, another major archdiocese in Spain appears in that table with 24V so, again, we know about a minimum of twenty-four victims, but there is no way to affirm that there are only twenty-four victims there.
Overall, as it is possible to see in the last row of the table there is a total of 509V; again, the V stands for a minimum of victims, not an actual total number of victims.
How would the bishops of Spain translate the data from the ombudsman or any other report into the numbers that some media in Spain reported back in December 2023, is pure alchemy, because there is no explanation for what they do.
Despite this and other issues, on July 9th, 2024, the bishops announced a new program called PRIVA, which stands for “Plan for the Integral Reparation of Victims of Abuse” (the full title in Spanish is Plan de Reparación Integral a Menores y Personas Equiparadas en Derecho, Victimas de Abusos Sexuales).
PRIVA was announced by the chair of the national conference of bishops, Luis Javier Argüello García, head of the archdiocese of Valladolid.
Luis Javier Argüello García, chair of the conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain. From their YouTube channel.
Argüello heralded PRIVA as a proof of how close they are to both Pope Francis and to the victims of clergy sexual abuse. However, he insisted during his presentation on the alleged need “to respect the autonomy” of the Church in Spain, as if the Catholic Church was under siege.
The day before the bishops’ announcement, the national government issued its own announcement regarding the clergy sexual abuse crisis there. Félix Bolaños, minister of the Presidency, Justice, and Relations with the Judiciary, held a meeting with survivors’ associations (a report from the Spanish national government is available in Spanish here).
The survivors were anxious about the announcement they knew the bishops were about to make the next day, as the government of Spain was. Hence Bolaños’s calling the bishops to address the survivors’ needs.
The minister framed his message as a continuation of a previous official announcement made on April 23rd 2024 (available in Spanish here) regarding a response to the ombudsman report of October 2023.
Bolaños said in April that the government’s plan would materialize a series of reforms from 2024 through 2027, but as the bishops’ announcement of PRIVA proves, there is now a certain urgency on the Church’s side to render the Church as active on the issue.
Meeting of Minister Bolaños with survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Palace of La Moncloa’s social media.
It could be that there is a real acknowledgment on the severity of the issue, but the plan itself is ambiguous. If bishops’ report is obscure regarding an estimate of the number of either victims or aggressors in the Catholic Church in Spain, the PRIVA plan is when providing an explanation of how will the bishops select whose victims deserve a compensation, what will be the amount of the compensation, and how they will give the compensation.
The PRIVA is laid out in three separate but rather short documents, with a total number 23 effective pages, available only in Spanish here.
Despite all these shortcomings and doubts regarding the true reach of the bishops’ calculations or how will they calculate the compensations for the victims, Argüello’s announcement of PRIVA was immediately greeted by the nuncio in Spain, the Filipino bishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, who congratulated his fellow bishops on behalf of Pope Francis.
What is worse. The bishops and the media closest to them in Spain presented themselves as advocates of the survivors of clergy sexual abuse when there are no elements to support that portrayal.
Gamechanger?
Bishop Argüello offered an enthusiastic presentation of PRIVA as if it was somehow a gamechanger while Vida Nueva Digital, a Spanish-speaking Catholic medium, published last week an editorial calling to avoid playing games with “with the abuses” (available in Spanish here).
And the government’s attitude was not especially different. It is not as if the issue of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, was new in Spain or at a global scale. What is a fact, however, is that as the recent cases in Spain, Chile, and Bolivia prove, the laws and courts in the Spanish-speaking world are not ready to deal with the reality of sexual abuse.
Change has happened. In Mexico and Chile, sex-related crimes no longer prescribe as it used to be. However, in Chile, a proposal to go over the cases of sexual and other types of abuse ended up constrained to dealing with only the cases in the so-called Servicio Nacional de Menores, a national agency similar to the offices of Child Services in local governments in the United States.
For Chilean survivors of clergy sexual abuse, their government should launch a probe to go after predators in the Catholic and other churches there.
The cases emerging from Bolivia these days could end up implicating the Church in Spain. Luis Roma Padrosa, a now deceased Jesuit, identified through his own diary and statements he made before his death to his superiors in that religious order ended up in Bolivia, as other Jesuits from Spain for reasons that remain unknown.
However, there is a chance that Roma Padrosa’s superiors in both Spain and Bolivia were aware of the abuse he was doing in South America. Instead of reporting him to their superiors in the Church or to the civil authorities in Bolivia, they let him move around from parish to parish, as a super-predator of girls
If that was the case and the Church in Spain is ready to deal with the abuses perpetrated by already dead priests, then there would be necessary to discuss whether the Spanish province of the Jesuits should compensate the Bolivian victims of Roma Padrosa in South America.
What is clear is that there is no more room to accept the way bishops in Mexico and other countries of Latin America deal with this issue. Even if the bishops in Spain are dragging their feet and trying to reduce as much as possible the number of cases they accept as such, their attitude reflects awareness of the potential effect of the politization of the issue.
In Mexico and other Latin American countries, however, bishops are still betting on denying the very existence of cases. One can see priests acting out as trolls in social media attacking victims and their advocates, demanding full disclosure of extremely complex cases in the 160-character limit imposed by former Twitter.
Also, one can also find that the very few bishops willing to acknowledge malfeasance from clergy predators, try to force the victims to follow therapies chosen by the Church.
Said therapies seek to blame the victim and to provide the bishop and the predator priest with an easy way out of the situation, as long as the victims avoid a legal process, as the story linked immediately below, available only in Spanish, describes.
Miraculous catch?
If they choose a legal process, then the fury of the lawyers paid by the bishop falls upon the victims, with no will to even acknowledging the very possibility of abuse while launching character assassination campaigns against the victims, their relatives, friends, and even their employers as to chastise them. That is what explains the loss of credibility that the Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod acknowledges.
The loss of credibility goes hand in hand with the arrogance of clergymen, who are oblivious to the victims’ plight.
If one pays attention to the account in what used to be Twitter broadcasting the Spanish bishops’ messages one will notice that the account sports, as its cover picture art originally made by noted sexual predator Marko Rupnik.
The account of the national conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain at what used to be Twitter sporting one of Rupnik’s mosaics.
The mosaic is not from Fatima or Aparecida, two of the Roman Catholic basilicas where Rupnik’s art is in full display as if nothing ever happened between him and his victims.
The piece, titled “The miraculous catch” comes straight from the chapel of the conference of bishops of Spain in Madrid, as can be seen with great detail in the Centro Aletti’s webiste or in this story about the most recent meeting of the conferences of Roman Catholic bishops in Europe from March 13th, 2024, where the bishops of Spain talk about supporting with their prayers the victims of the war in Ukraine.
In that regard, the elaborated speech of archbishop Argüello about the victims of clergy sexual abuse, available in full below, seems almost impossible to reconcile with Pope Francis’s idea of a “spirituality of reparation” or with the most basic understanding of the victims’ plight.
And that is where any cleric willing to find the root cause of the loss of credibility should look.
— Survivors of clergy sex abuse react to ruling in favor of Seattle Archdiocese
by Natalie Swaby
On Friday, a judge decided to not force the Seattle Archdiocese to turn over records that the Attorney General’s Office has been asking for since last July.
Ahead of the hearing, survivors of clergy sexual abuse made a point to be at the courthouse.
“For me personally I have been working hard for this day for 31 or 32 years, since I faced my abuse by a priest when I was seven,” said Mary Dispenza.
Wearing a pin with a picture of her at that age, Dispenza is now on a mission to expose what she said the Catholic Church has kept hidden.
The Seattle Archdiocese has released its official record of clergy credibly accused. There are more than 80 names on the list.
“I don’t believe that 80 is the accurate number at all,” said Dispenza, who believes it is much higher.
That’s why she was at the courthouse on Friday afternoon.
“Release the records to the public domain. By records I mean the stories how they happened, who was responsible so we can make a better future,” Dispenza said.
In court, the state made its case first.
“We ask for a ruling that the church is not immune from this investigation,” said First Assistant Attorney General Kristin Beneski.
The Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation into whether the Catholic Church used charitable funds to cover up child sex abuse.
“When you hide that fact that a member of the clergy is abusing children or other vulnerable people, but then you allow them to keep doing their job but in different locations, you are exposing people in those different location to that abuser,” said Beneski.
>“The Attorney General was not given the authority pursuant to a charitable trust act to supervise and to enforce a religious corporation that is tax exempt,” argued Theresa DeMonte, the attorney for the Seattle Archdiocese.
The judge’s decision was to deny the state’s application.
After the hearing, Attorney General Bob Ferguson talked about the remarks made by the attorneys for the Seattle Archdiocese.
“What I heard in there was wildly inconsistent with what I understand Catholicism to be. What I saw in there was shameful,” said Ferguson. “We can go all the way to the state supreme court.”
“When it comes to crimes i just don’t believe anyone should be exempt, and we are not going to give up.” Said Dispenza.
The Seattle Archdiocese released the following statement after Friday’s ruling, saying “sexual abuse in the Church is a heart-wrenching part of our history, and I am deeply sorry for the pain caused to victim survivors, their families and all Catholics.
“We remain focused on the need for healing and proper governance in these matters,” said Archbishop Paul D. Etienne. “While ironing out the legalities is important, I take no pleasure in today’s outcome. Because we are committed to preventing abuse, promoting transparency and continuously improving our processes, my offer to collaborate with the attorney general still stands.”
Officially reversing a controversial March ruling, Louisiana’s highest court Wednesday gave childhood victims of sexual abuse a renewed opportunity to file damage lawsuits.
The state Supreme Court’s 5-2 ruling Wednesday upholds a so-called look-back law that was passed in 2021 and amended in 2022. The law gave victims of past abuse, whose deadlines for filing civil lawsuits had expired, renewed opportunities to file lawsuits. The original legislation set a deadline of June 14 of this year. That deadline was later extended until June 2027.
Wednesday’s move had been expected. The court had ruled 4-3 in March that the law couldn’t stand because it conflicted with due process rights in the state constitution. But the court agreed last month to reconsider the case.
Justices Scott Crichton and Piper Griffin, part of the majority in March, joined justices joined Chief Justice John Weimer and justices Jay McCallum and William Crain to revive the law.
“For many victims of child sexual abuse, the revival provision represents their first and only opportunity to bring suit,” Weimer wrote in the new ruling. “Providing that opportunity to those victims is a legitimate legislative purpose.”
Justices James Genovese and Jefferson Hughes dissented. Genovese wrote that the new ruling “obliterates” decades of precedent and “elevates a legislative act over a constitutional right.”
The ruling comes as the Catholic Church continues to deal with the ramifications of a decades-old sex scandal. The ruling arose from a case filed against the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette by plaintiffs who said they were molested by a priest in the 1970s while they ranged in age from 8 to 14, according to the Supreme Court record.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill hailed the court’s reversal, as did advocates for abuse victims.
“We are elated that victims of sexual abuse who have been time barred from justice will have their day in court,” Mike McDonnell, of the advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in an emailed statement.
