The Vatican is investigating 14 cases of alleged child sex abuse committed within the Spanish Catholic Church over the past nine years it emerged today. The incidents of abuse are alleged to take have taken place between January 2001 and March 2010. Charles Scicluna, the promoter of justice in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said today they amounted to "less than one case every year".
Monsignor Scicluna stressed that Spain was one of the countries with the “lowest number of alleged abuse investigations” and said no convictions had been made.
The Vatican investigation in Spain widens the number of alleged abuse cases involving the Catholic Church after recent cases in Italy, Ireland and Germany.
Church Without Abuse, a Spanish victims’ group, welcomed the statement.
Carlos Sanchez, the group’s spokesman, said: “This is good news that the Vatican has started to investigate these affairs. Spain has never been an oasis where there has never been a case.”
Reports in the Spanish media today said that aside from the 14 cases which form a part of the Vatican investigation, a total of 25 priests and lay preachers have been implicated in child abuse cases over the past 25 years.
In the latest case, a priest in Terrassa, near Barcelona, was suspended last month after allegations that he exposed himself.
In another case, a Spanish monk is due to go on trial tomorrow in Madrid accused of sexually abusing children at a religious order.
José Angel Arregui Eraña, who is in his 50s, was arrested in August 2009 in Chile, where he was teaching. He was held on suspicion of filming the abuse in Spain and possessing the images in Chile.
Police in Chile said that Arregui filmed the abuse at the San Viator religious order in Spain, where he worked between 1979 and 2007 in Madrid and Basauri in the Basque country.
A spokesman for the San Viator order said that it was surprised at news of the arrest.
Despite falling church attendances, the Catholic Church in Spain is said to wield much power which victims claim makes it hard for them to denounce their abusers.
Juan Pedro Oliver, a lawyer who acted for a 12-year-old boy who was sexually abused by Amador Romero, a priest in Granada in 2001, said that his client came under pressure to withdraw the allegation.
Romero was later jailed for 18 months for sexual abuse of a minor.
“The bishop, instead of helping the victim to make the allegation, did exactly the opposite,” Mr Pedro said.
“He kept the priest in the same village and made it difficult to go ahead with the case.”
Bishop Juan Garcia-Santacruz, of Guadix, near Granada, denied the allegations.
A spokesman for the Spanish Bishops’ Conference told The Times: “This investigation is being carried out by the Vatican not by the Church in Spain. We do not want to comment.”
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