A law firm “will open an independent channel to receive possible complaints, will review the legal procedures aimed at punishing criminal practices and will offer its collaboration to the authorities to help clarify the facts,” said the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) it’s a statement.
The firm Cremades & Calvo Sotelo will also help “establish a prevention system that meets social demands in this regard,” added the CEE, which called a press conference on Tuesday to give details of the scope of the independent audit.
Until this moment, the Catholic Church in Spain ruled out an exhaustive investigation into pederasty within itunlike what happened in other European countries such as Germany, Ireland or France or what happened in Australia or the United States.
The Church, which officially only recognizes 220 cases since 2001, alleges that it does not want to do a “statistical analysis” and defends its strategy of having established offices in the dioceses to receive complaints and implement action protocols for child abuse.
In the absence of official statistics, the newspaper El País opened a mailbox to receive complaints and has counted 1,246 victims since the 1930s, in this country with a strong Catholic tradition.
The CEE’s announcement comes amid strong political pressure to investigate child abuse within the Church Catholic, an institution that is accused by associations of victims of opacity.
At the beginning of February, the Socialist Party of the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sanchezrequested in Congress the formation of a commission of experts, led by the Ombudsman, to investigate these events.
The Congress of Deputies is also weighing another request, made by the minority partner of the Socialists in the government, the leftist Canand two regional separatist parties, to initiate the investigations but from the parliament itself.
The political impulse came after a well-known case was revealed in January, that of the Catalan writer Alejandro Palomas, who reported having been abused in a Catholic school in the 1970s when he was 8 years old.
Sánchez gave the writer unusual public support and received him at the Moncloa Palace in recent days.
Source: Ambito
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