Spanish Jesuits acknowledge decades of sexual abuse

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

Victims’ associations praised the disclosure, but criticized the fact that it did not disclose the names of the aggressors or their accessories. They also want criminal proceedings against several surviving aggressors and a detailed compensation plan for victims.

“It is a timid measure that is going in the right direction, but it is very short,” Miguel Hurtado, a spokesman for the Stolen Children’s Association, said on Friday.

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

Jesus’ company in Spain said in a report released on Thursday that the internal investigation had confirmed that 96 members had been accused of sexual abuse since 1927, the year of the first case. For 65 Jesuits, the victims were minors. However, the report points out that defendants represent only 1% of the 8,782 members admitted to order in the last 93 years.

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff, sought to sensitize the Church around the world to the problem of clerical abuse and passed laws to hold members of the hierarchy accountable.

As with other religious orders specializing in education, the report shows that Jesuit schools have become rich hunting grounds for predatory priests, providing a steady number of victims. Most of the abuses took place or were related to schools, the Jesuits said.

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

The cases recorded come from complaints, eyewitness reports and journalistic reports and range from inappropriate statements to abuses and violations.

The Spanish newspaper El País said that in its investigation into cases of sexual abuse of the clergy since 1986, only eight of the 123 alleged perpetrators were Jesuits until the order’s report was published. The revelation, says the newspaper, “is information called to explode the few known statistics on child abuse in the Spanish Catholic Church.”

The report claims that there are 19 cases of “rumors” in which no evidence was found to allow credible complaints and that 15 of the accused Jesuits were acquitted.

The recognition of Spanish Jesuits is significant because, in general, religious orders have escaped criminal investigations, national investigations, and voluntary disclosures of sexual abuse, which tend to focus on diocesan priests.

Some religious orders in the United States have been forced to disclose information about predators in their ranks as part of civil or bankruptcy proceedings. Others have done so voluntarily, albeit under pressure after the latest outbreak of scandal in the United States in 2018, but many mandates have managed to hide this information, and outside the United States disclosure by warrant is extremely rare.

The great religious orders function in many ways outside the diocesan structure of the Catholic hierarchy and respond to their own superiors, who in turn respond directly to the Vatican. For this reason, they are not usually subject to the rules or recommendations of their national episcopal conferences, which in recent years have tried to control the issue, but few outside the United States agree to publish the names of the accused priests.

For Hurtado – himself a victim of abuse when he was a member of a group of young Catholics in northeastern Spain – the identification of the perpetrators is necessary because the hierarchy hid the accused clergy for years, transferred them from dioceses or parishes or even sent them to abroad as missionaries.

“Once again, the report gives the impression that the abuses occurred by chance, with bad luck, not as a result of a policy of institutional coverage implemented for decades,” the activist said.

The Jesuits presented their findings after a two-year internal investigation as an act of contrition. They acknowledged that it was a “limited study” and that “the reality of abuse has been insufficiently addressed in the past, which has contributed to more pain”.

“Our goal is to create a safe environment in our work and tasks, and a fundamental part of this is to be accountable for the past,” said Antonio España, the Jesuit provincial superior.

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

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

The order acknowledges, which is unusual, that in some cases it offered financial or therapy assistance, although it said it did not consider them legal compensation.

Jesus’ company said it was developing a repair protocol in accordance with Spanish law.

“By no means do we understand that compensation erases suffering, but we want to provide an answer whenever possible,” he said.

In the United States, the northwestern section of the Jesuits paid in 2011 what was the largest compensation to date, $ 166 million to 500 victims, many of them from indigenous peoples who had been raped and abused. in remote schools and parishes in the United States. Jesuits in Alaska.