Spanish Jesuits acknowledge decades of sexual abuse

The first thorough investigation of allegations of sexual abuse by a religious order in Spain has identified 81 minors and 37 adult victims of abuse perpetrated by 96 Jesuits, a much higher figure than the publicly known cases to date.

Victims’ associations praised the revelation, but criticized the fact that it does not reveal the names of the abusers or their cover-ups. They also want criminal proceedings to be opened against the few survivors who are still alive and a detailed compensation plan for the victims.

“It’s a timid measure that is going in the right direction, but it falls very short,” Robbed Childhood Association spokesman Miguel Hurtado told AP 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 runs 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 on Thursday that the internal investigation confirmed that 96 members had been accused of sexual abuse since 1927, the year of the first recorded case. For 65 Jesuits, the victims were minors. However, the report highlights that defendants make up just 1% of the 8,782 members admitted to the order over the past 93 years.

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff, has tried to raise awareness around the world about the problem of clerical abuse and has passed laws to hold members of the hierarchy accountable for it.

As with other religious orders specializing in education, the report shows that Jesuit schools became rich hunting grounds for predatory chaplains, to whom they supplied a steady number of victims. Most of the abuses had taken place in schools or were related to them, the Jesuits said.

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

The cases recorded stem from allegations, eyewitness accounts and journalistic reports and range from inappropriate statements to abuse and rape.

The Spanish newspaper El País said that in its investigation of cases of sexual abuse by clergy since 1986, only eight of the 123 alleged perpetrators were Jesuits until the report of the order became known. The revelation, the newspaper says, “is a fact called to shatter the few known statistics on child abuse in the Spanish Catholic Church.”

The report argues that there are 19 cases of “rumors” where no evidence has been found to make credible allegations and that 15 of the accused Jesuits were acquitted.

The recognition of Spanish Jesuits is significant, given that in general religious orders have escaped criminal investigations, national inquiries, and voluntary disclosures of sexual abuse, which have to be concentrated in the chaplains of dioceses.

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

The great religious orders operate 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. Therefore, they are not usually subject to the rules or recommendations of their national bishops ’conferences, which in recent years have tried to control the problem, but few outside the United States agree to publish the names of the accused chaplains.

For Hurtado – himself a victim of abuse when he was a member of a Catholic youth group in northeastern Spain – the identification of the perpetrators is necessary because the hierarchy for years hid the accused clergy, moved them from diocese or from parish or even sent them abroad as missionaries.

“Once again, the report gives the impression that the abuses have arisen by chance, unfortunately, not as a result of a policy of institutional cover-up 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 this is 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 works and tasks and a fundamental part of this is to be accountable for the past,” said Antonio Spain, 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 elevated the training of its clergy and employees to prevent abuse and at the same time create a space where possible victims can file their complaints.

Rules have also been drawn up to respond to suspicious cases as part of a “profound culture change,” the Jesuits said.

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

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

“By no means do we understand that compensation will erase suffering, but we do want to give an answer wherever possible,” he said.

In the United States, the northwestern section of the Jesuits paid in 2011 what was by far the largest reparation, $ 166 million to 500 victims, many of them from indigenous peoples who suffered rape and abuse in schools. and remote Jesuit parishes in Alaska.