CáDIZ (SPAIN)
The Tablet [Market Harborough, England]
November 17, 2025
By Bess Twiston Davies
Bishop Rafael Zornoza said the allegations dating from the 1990s were ‘very serious and furthermore false’.
The Bishop of Cádiz and Ceuta stepped down from his duties pending a Vatican investigation of a claim he abused a 14-year-old in the 1990s.
Four months ago, the alleged victim wrote directly to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith (DDF) accusing Bishop Rafael Zornoza of repeatedly abusing him while he was attending a minor seminary in Getafe, a diocese north of Madrid.
The Spanish daily El País reported that his email to the Vatican began: “I write this letter solely with the intention of avoiding another child still having to go through what I went through.”
The abuse allegedly began in 1994, when he was a boy of 14 and Zornoza, rector of the seminary of Getafe. The victim claimed the priest, then aged 45, would enter his bed to “caress” him after he had acknowledged homosexual acts in Confession.
He further alleged that after he entered major seminary, Zornoza would enter his bed “nearly every morning and night” to kiss and touch him.
“On various occasions I said to Rafa [the bishop] what we were doing was wrong. He always said this was an intimate friendship,” the victim said in his email to the DDF. He alleged the abuse continued until he was 21 years old.
In a statement on Monday, Zornoza denied the allegations, saying: “The accusations, referring to events which occurred nearly 30 years ago, are very serious and furthermore false.” He revealed in the same statement he was suffering from an aggressive cancer.
Last year, Zornoza who is Bishop of Cádiz, in southern Spain and Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in north Africa, presented his resignation to Pope Francis on reaching the age of 75.
On Monday, Archbishop Luis Argüello of Valladolid, the president of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, said the Roman Rota had begun to investigate the claims a fortnight ago.
Speaking in Rome after a meeting between Pope Leo and the conference leadership, Argüello said the Pope knew of the investigation which fell within the jurisdiction of the Holy See.
“What was said to us – not by the Holy Father but another party elsewhere – was that [Zornoza’s] resignation might be accepted soon. But we have not been told a date or how that resignation might happen,” he said.