Bishops and government reach agreement on sexual abuse in Spain

The agreement allows victims to bring their cases even if the case has prescribed or if the alleged perpetrator is already dead.

The agreement will be open for a maximum of two years. The victims’ compensation will be tax-exempt.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

The government and the Catholic Church of Spain announced they reached a preliminary agreement to compensate victims of clergy sexual abuse.

The agreement includes provisions to acknowledge cases whose alleged perpetrators are already dead, or the crimes have prescribed under existing statutes.

The national government agreed to acknowledge the existence of abuse in non-religious settings and, more specifically, in non-Catholic contexts. It was also agreed that the government will issue an exemption from payment of taxes over the monies the Church will offer as part of the preliminary settlement.

On Thursday, Luis Argüello, the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Spain and archbishop of Valladolid, joined Félix Bolaños, minister of Justice, and the chair of the conference of Catholic religious orders in Spain, Jesús Díaz Sariego.

Together they hailed the agreement as a significant step to provide a measure of justice to an unknown number of victims. A 2023 study by the ombudsman of Spain estimated that 1.1 percent of the population had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of members of the clergy or individuals linked to the Church, equivalent to 440,000 individuals. More details about that study and the Spanish bishops’ own estimate of the number of victims in their country are available in the story linked after this paragraph.

An installment, published in 2023 of the ongoing series on clergy sexual abuse at Los Ángeles Press, linked after this paragraph, estimated a minimum of less than 29 thousand and more than 73 thousand victims of either priests or male members of religious orders.

That estimation followed the algorithm developed by the Sauvé Report in France. As such, it limits the analysis to the victims of priests and members of male religious orders, while the estimate developed by the Ombudsman includes teachers, professors, and other personnel linked to the Catholic Church and its schools.

A major roadblock lifted as a consequence of the preliminary settlement is that the victims will be able to bring their cases to the government of Spain and not to the Church, as it was necessary.

Under the new agreement, victims will be able to approach a new entity under the Ministry of Justice’s purview to file a claim. The ministry will pass it on to the ombudsman, who will study it and propose a compensation package that a joint committee of the conference of bishops and the conference of religious orders will assess and make an offer.

If no agreement is reached, the case will go to a joint committee with representatives of the church, the ombudsman's office and victims' associations. If that committee is also unable to reach an agreement, the ombudsman's decision will stand.

This is relevant in the context of Spain, as the Church is surrendering its veto power over the individual agreements, a massive concession probably forced by the many cases that have been dismissed in courts in Spain over the expiration of the statute of limitations, and the growing acknowledgement among Catholic prelates of the perverse effects of denialism as their preferred strategy to deal with these issues.

The preliminary agreement effectively concludes a negotiation cycle opened in October 2024, when Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the Vatican to urge a resolution that the Spanish Conference of Bishops had spent years resisting, as the story linked after this paragraph details.

The window for filing claims will be open for one year. After that, the agreement can be extended for an additional year if needed, according to Bolaños who thanked the bishops, while acknowledging the late Pope Francis, his successor, Leo XIV, and the victims’ associations for their contributions to reaching the agreement.

Although it is unclear what will be the amount of the compensations, other European countries have offered up to 63 thousand euros per victim, as in the case of Ireland, although Belgium barely offered less than a ten percent of that sum, a total of six thousand euros per victim.

Before the agreement, the Catholic Church in Spain had settled a total of 114 cases, with a total of 1.9 million euros, for a 16 thousand euros average compensation per victim, as published yesterday by the social media accounts of the conference of bishops.

By the end of 2025, the now emeritus bishop of Cádiz, a diocese on the Mediterranean coast of Southern Spain, Rafael Zornoza Boy ended his tenure, at 76, in the middle of a scandal as the Conference of Catholic Bishops accepted there is a standing accusation against Zornoza going back to his days as headmaster and professor at the Seminary of the diocese of Getafe, an exurb of Madrid.

The diocese has been placed under the control of Ramón Daría Valdivia Jiménez the auxiliary bishop of Seville, as the apostolic administrator of the so-called vacant see. Zornoza was the first sitting bishop accused of clergy sexual abuse in Spain, as the story linked after this paragraph explained in the section “A first ever in Spain.”

The agreement is available in Spanish, as a PDF file after this paragraph.