At a service of reparation for abuse on 21 October, Cardinal José Cobo said the “tears and wounds” of survivors had opened the Church’s “eyes” and acknowledged the Church had “not cared for victims”.
He said: “We have resisted understanding you when you most needed us to do so. We are deeply sorry.”
Testimonies from survivors were read aloud during the service which began at the doors of Madrid’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Almudena.
A sign outside the cathedral said: “Whatever you did the least of these, you did to me.” Participants planted an olive tree nearby, as a symbol acknowledging abuse.
Fr José Luis Segovia, pastoral vicar for the archdiocese, said the Church in Madrid wanted “to accept the guilt that is ours”.
Cobo described the ceremony as “a recognition there have been abusers within the Church”.
“It’s cost us to recognise that,” he continued, describing abusers as “the opposite” of what the Church claimed to believe and enact. “That there may be abusers elsewhere is no consolation,” he said.
Cobo thanked survivors for their “tenacity and courage” saying this had “pressed” the Church “to purify our style of relating both inside and outside the Church”.
He added: “We need to continue to mature in order to put into place a way of functioning as Church that is less clerical, more synodal and co-responsible.”
Those present included members of the team of the national ombudsmen Ángel Gabilondo. In October 2023, he published the results of a government inquiry into abuse in the Catholic Church in Spain.
This included a sample survey of 8,013 people which found that 1.13 per cent were affected by abuse in the Church, with just over half of it perpetrated by clergy or Religious.
In May this year, Archbishop Jesús Sanz Montes of Oviedo accused the Spanish government of claiming “only the Catholic Church” was guilty of harbouring sexual abuse. He said the government’s focus on sexual abuse in the Church was “a kind of obsessive mantra”.