(SPAIN)
Omnes [El Paso, TX]
March 25, 2026
By Javier García Herrería
The public and political conversation is becoming too narrowly delimited to the responsibility of the Church, leaving a broader and more complex inquiry into causes, contexts and shared responsibilities in the background.
In recent weeks, various media outlets in Spain have intensified their criticism of the Catholic Church for its handling of sexual abuse cases, with a particular focus on the issue of victim compensation. According to this narrative, the ecclesiastical institution would not be responding adequately to the demands for reparations, which would justify government intervention to ensure satisfactory settlements.
However, this public debate raises relevant questions in terms of coherence, memory and approach that deserve further analysis.
Is the origin of the problem in the Church?
On the one hand, the historical contrast in the media treatment of certain cultural references is striking. In the 1970s, more than 69 French intellectuals signed a manifesto calling for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors. Among the signatories were such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jack Lang -who later became Minister of Culture- and Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières.
Many of these authors have been subsequently promoted, celebrated and turned into references by the same media spaces that today strongly denounce the abuses committed by part of the clergy. Without questioning in any way the unquestionable need to hold the Church accountable for the crimes committed within it, it is worth noting the absence of an equally rigorous scrutiny of those who, at the time, defended positions that today are socially and morally unacceptable.
Moreover, the media that contributed to extolling these figures have rarely been self-critical of their own role in the cultural legitimization of certain ideas. The paradox is hard to ignore: those who helped to normalize problematic postulates in the past, today strongly condemn their consequences without assuming any responsibility or even the slightest “mea culpa”.
This raises a fundamental question: is it appropriate to attribute moral responsibility for abuse almost exclusively to a single institution such as the Catholic Church, which has always doctrinally rejected these practices? Or should we also examine the role of certain intellectuals, cultural currents and media loudspeakers who, in other historical moments, contributed to eroding certain ethical limits?
Forgetting the majority of victims
In addition to this, there is another relevant fact: according to the Attorney General’s Office, only 0.45 % of child abuse currently takes place in ecclesiastical environments. Despite this, news coverage tends to concentrate very significantly on this specific area, generating a public perception that does not always correspond to the real distribution of the problem.
In parallel, some policy proposals have raised the need to address the phenomenon in a comprehensive manner, investigating all the contexts in which abuse occurs -family, educational, sports or institutional- and establishing reparation mechanisms for all victims. However, these initiatives have not received comparable media attention, which reinforces the impression that the debate is biased.
All of this suggests that the public and political conversation is becoming too narrowly confined to the responsibility of a particular institution, leaving a broader and more complex reflection on causes, contexts and shared responsibilities in the background.
And here emerges the real “elephant in the room” of this problem: the absence of a truly universal approach to the recognition and compensation of victims. While the focus is concentrated almost exclusively on cases linked to the Church, the vast majority of victims of abuse in other areas are left without the same level of visibility or proposals for reparations.
In this sense, the tendency to establish “categories” of victims selectively shifts the focus to certain perpetrators, so that the focus is no longer truly on the victims and their integral reparation. The result is an added injustice: those who have suffered the harm are further subordinated to a narrative that prioritizes who to point the finger at rather than who to repair.
Is the agreement fulfilled?
And, ultimately, the lack of interest of a large part of the press in the victims of abuse as a whole is evident, seriously eroding its moral credibility and its alleged professionalism. And if not, let’s ask ourselves why no media is pushing for the fulfillment of one of the points that agreed by the government with the bishops’ conference on January 8:
“The development of this mechanism for reparations to victims of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is part of the framework of the commitment of the Government of to promote the fulfillment of the purposes set forth in Organic Law 8/2021, of June 4, on the comprehensive protection of children and adolescents against violence, in order to address comprehensive reparations for victims of abuse in any area of social life“.
Will the Spanish bishops sign a reparations plan without the government having kept its word to make reparations to victims in other areas? Is this not a good occasion for the Church to reinforce its moral authority by demanding that the government investigate all victims of abuse?