The prelate noted that “cases are investigated at the offices regardless of the statute of limitations or the death of the accused” and that “of these 506 cases, there are 103 people who are already deceased.” Likewise, he said that 300 “are due to complaints that have occurred more than 30 years ago.”
However, he stressed that all cases that arrive are investigated, even those that are already inactionable “both civilly and canonically”, because the objective is “to know the circumstances of what happened.”
“The complaints refer to clerics, priests, diocesan priests, religious priests, ordained religious, religious who have not been ordained and are popularly called ‘brothers’, and lay people who have some task or work within the Church,” he said.
Finally, the prelate noted that “the Church remains committed to developing training processes that prevent as far as humanly possible that this situation should occur in the present, as well as in the future, as well as to remove those people who show that they are unworthy.”
Likewise, he stressed that the objective is also to safeguard the integrity of the members who worthily fulfill their mission with dedication and don’t deserve to live under suspicion or accusation.
“We want the truth to shine forth so that there are no wolves that disguise themselves as lambs and are shepherds,” he said.
“But also, so that tens of thousands of people who give their lives and have done so throughout all these decades in educational, catechetical, and missionary activity are not subjected to permanent suspicion and that it can’t be said, because it is manifestly unjust, that the Church is an unsafe place for children, adolescents and young people,” the spokesman for the Spanish Bishops’ Conference concluded.
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