Spain is to set up a fund, to be financed largely by the Catholic Church, to compensate an estimated 440,000 victims of decades of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, staff or teachers, the justice minister announced on Tuesday.
A report in October by Spain’s human rights ombudsman produced the estimate from a survey of 8,000 people. It recommended the creation of a state fund, accusing the Church of a lack of cooperation and seeking to “minimise the phenomenon”.
Justice Minister Felix Bolanos told reporters the Church, hugely influential in Spanish society and politics up to and beyond the end of a right-wing dictatorship in the 1970s, had failed over decades to address calls for reparations, and that its responses to the report had varied by diocese.
“We want to respond in order to prevent, to repair and to try to settle the debt that our society owes the victims,” Bolanos said.
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