(PORTUGAL)
Portugal Resident [Lagoa, Portugal]
September 16, 2026
By Natasha Donn
“Entire process has been carried out behind closed doors”, stresses association
The Coração Silenciado association, which represents victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, is petitioning President of the Republic, António José Seguro, to promote an audit of the tortuous compensation process underway, asking him to bring an end to statutes of limitations for these cases.
“We are going to present a proposal to review and audit the process of financial compensation and support for victims of sexual abuse in the context of the Catholic Church in Portugal, because we believe that after this entire process developed behind closed doors, initiated on its own behalf and closed on its own behalf, it is up to the State to carry out some verification, some audit of the entire way in which it took place”, the association’s spokesperson, António Grosso, tells Lusa.
After having cancelled, in July, a meeting in Belém because it wanted to be received by the President, the association will meet on Friday with António José Seguro, to whom it will be delivering a dossier on the complicated compensation process.
“We are going to ask the State to assume responsibility because it is responsible for the protection of children and young people”, but, “above all, (the State must) move forward with some legislation, starting by ending this concept of statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors” – as already happens in other countries.
For António Grosso, “statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors cannot exist, because trauma does not expire in the minds and bodies of the victims“.
“It is ridiculous that there are statutes of limitations of 15 or 25 years when it is known, publicly and sociologically, that victims, for the most part, only come to reveal secrets of sexual abuse more than 30 or 40 years after” what happened and when they get “to talk about the matter, the abuser’s crime has already expired”, he said.
So far, according to António Grosso, only 57 people have received the announced compensation, after an initial validation of 512 testimonies by the Independent Commission, which was later replaced by the VITA Group, a structure with psychologists that assessed each complaint on a case-by-case basis.
“Compared with the 4,815 victims estimated by the Independent Commission to have been abused in the Catholic Church in recent decades, (…) the final result is very little”, he points out.
“All of this was already reason enough” for the State to intervene, “since it is up to the State, institutionally, constitutionally and by tradition to protect children and young people”, he said, recalling that many of the abuses took place in Church facilities to which minors were sent by State/ public services.
“The State did not have its own facilities and sent the most vulnerable children to convents, seminaries and children’s homes, but then it did not ensure the protection that was required and there was no supervision”, Grosso stresses.
The association therefore wants the President of the Republic, “in his capacity and in his power of influence, to be able to urge other State bodies and the sovereign body that is the Assembly of the Republic, (…) to consider the possibility of actually carrying out a review and audit of this entire process”.
For António Grosso, the financial award process has contributed to the “revictimisation” of people, “with long interviews of the victims by investigative committees, where they did not have the most basic rights and could not be accompanied by anyone”, before “two or three inquisitors” who “had all the power over the process”, to “calculate the price of our suffering”.
In addition, “victims are prohibited from seeing the report that has been written about them and their lives and on the basis of which the financial compensation was made”, he said, stressing that there are cases that did not move forward because the files were archived at the Vatican and/ or involved clergy of other nationalities.
“There are too many errors and inconsistencies throughout this process“, he argued.
In April, the outgoing president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, Bishop José Ornelas, estimated that the internal investigations into abuses, support for victims and compensation entailed a total expenditure for the Church of €3 million – with individual amounts ranging between €9,000 and €45,000.
There are cases ongoing in the courts and investigations by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and Bishop Ornelas said he hoped that the “country’s institutions function so that this investigation can be carried out impartially and also so that people can be summoned” by the authorities.
Source: LUSA