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INPRIMATU
The Spanish Church approves a plan to "heal" victims of sexual abuse, but will not have to comply with it
  • The Spanish Episcopal Conference approved on Tuesday the payment of financial compensation to victims of sexual abuse, although dioceses and congregations will not be obliged to execute them. The Spanish Government has strongly criticised the plan, which has been done "unilaterally", not counting the victims.
Urko Apaolaza Avila @urkoapaolaza 2024ko uztailaren 10

The highest body in the Catholic Church approved its own plan of care for citizens who have been sexually abused for decades by representatives of the Church this Tuesday.

At the meeting, in which representatives of the religious conferences participated in addition to the 67 bishops, which adopted documents to give concrete form to the plan ' s guidelines. Among the measures envisaged are reparation to victims, prevention of re-victimisation or investigation of specific cases.

The Church will create an institution with the objective of responding to the victims "with a procedure that will not be judicial". Thus, this institution will have the function of analyzing and clarifying each case individually, but always as requested by the victim for their “healing”.

In any case, the dioceses and the more than 400 religious congregations of the Spanish Church will not be obliged to comply with this plan. They're just criteria.

At the end of the meeting, the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Luis Argüello, said what he thinks of the plan: "It is a call to the variant, to communion, to what we have received from the Lord of the Cross" (it is a call to conversion and to communion).

According to last year's Ararteko report, 440,000 people throughout the state could have been victims of the Church's pederastia. The investigation, published in the journal El País, has already recorded 2,735 cases and is accused of a total of 1,532 representatives of the Church.

The Spanish Government has in no way assessed the Church’s approval of this plan. The Minister of Justice and Presidency, Félix Bolaños, has asked for the approval of a plan involving those affected. The spokeswoman for the Spanish Government, Pilar Alegría, has also censored the plan because, in her view, it is unilateral and does not take into account the recommendations of the Spanish Ombudsman.