Spanish Catholic Church plagued by pedophiles – media
Published 20 Apr, 2026 17:33 | Updated 20 Apr, 2026 18:35
More than 3,000 people have reportedly suffered sexual abuse as minors within the Spanish Catholic Church, according to an eight-year investigation by the El Pais newspaper which published its latest findings on Monday.
The outlet began collecting data on sex crimes within the church in 2018, when only 34 cases were officially known. Since then, through public testimonies, judicial records, and church admissions, the number of victims of pedophilia has risen to 3,084 with the earliest incidents dating back to the 1940’s.
The list of accused has reached 1,613, representing 1.46% of the 110,000 priests and laypeople who have served in Spain in the past 80 years.
El Pais’ latest report, the sixth in five years, has added 58 new testimonies from Spain accusing 50 clerics and laypeople, all men except two nuns, and a separate section covering 21 testimonies from eight Latin American countries with 24 individuals accused.
The outlet said that it has shared all its findings with the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), the Vatican, and Spain’s human rights commissioner. However, the newspaper noted that over the past five years, the Church has not responded substantively to the allegations with the CEE prioritizing “opacity and denial” while the Vatican has delegated responsibility to the Spanish bishops.
El Pais has also noted a recurring pattern where accused priests are often transferred between parishes or sent abroad, sometimes to Latin America, without facing canonical or civil consequences. In several cases, religious orders are accused of having moved known offenders to new locations where they continued to have access to children.
Previously, a 2023 survey by Spain’s human rights commissioner estimated that 1.13% of the adult population, about 440,000 people, may have suffered sexual abuse in a Catholic environment.
The latest findings mirror similar revelations in the US, where the Diocese of Brooklyn is currently seeking a global settlement for 1,100 child sex abuse cases, having already paid over $100 million to survivors.
Pope Leo XIV, who will visit Spain in June, is said to have received copies of El Pais’s reports but the Vatican has yet to comment on the latest findings.
EL PAÍS submits to the Vatican a report identifying 24 people accused of child sexual abuse in the Americas
More than half of the cases are located in Colombia, and the rest in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, the United States, Mexico, and Venezuela
In 2018, EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia within the Spanish Church and maintains an up-to-date database of all known cases. If you know of any cases that have not yet been reported, you can write to us at: abuses@elpais.es. For cases in Latin America, the address is: abusesamerica@elpais.es
The investigation that EL PAÍS has undertaken in recent years into clerical pedophilia in the Americas, in which it has already published dozens of cases, continues with the delivery to the Vatican of a report containing 21 testimonies accusing a total of 24 priests, religious members, and laypeople from eight countries. Colombia accounts for more than half of the cases, a total of 13, and the rest are located in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, the United States, Mexico, and Venezuela.
This more than 100‑page report accompanies the sixth dossier of cases from Spain that the newspaper has also submitted to the Holy See, bringing to 841 the number of testimonies gathered in Spain over the past five years. Together, they exceed 1,800 pages. This first case report from the Americas expands the investigative project to the entire continent.
EL PAÍS began preparing these dossiers for the Vatican in 2021 after receiving an overwhelming number of testimonies through its victim‑support email account, which was also opened to readers in the Americas in 2022 (abusosamerica@elpais.es). The initiative emerged from the impossibility of publishing every case and from evidence that most allegations were being covered up locally by dioceses and religious orders.
By compiling the information, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith could be made aware of the complaints and investigate them, as it is required to do whenever it receives any report. Several cases included in this new dossier from the Americas once again show that many allegations never reach Rome, despite the fact that reporting them has been mandatory since 2001. Instead, they have been ignored.
The stories now coming to light reveal that in almost all of the Catholic Church in Latin America, there is still much to be done, in contrast to the progress already made in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Only the Church in Chile has undertaken anything similar to the Ryan Report from Ireland or the MHG/Dressing Report from Germany, according to academics Veronique Lecaros, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and Ana Lourdes Suárez, from the Catholic University of Argentina, editors of a recent book titled Abusos eclesiales en América Latina. Una crisis en el corazón del catolicismo (Ecclesiastical Abuse in Latin America: A Crisis at the Heart of Catholicism). In 2020, a report published in Chile by the Commission for the Analysis of the Crisis in the Catholic Church documented 568 victims of sexual abuse, 320 of whom were minors, and identified 225 perpetrators.
“In Chile, a series of circumstances forced a more serious approach to the problem,” the academics assert, “but elsewhere, no country has given any indication that it will do anything similar.” The driving force was Pope Francis himself, who personally took charge of the Chile case and forced the entire episcopal leadership to resign in one stroke. It was an exception — the result of the Argentine pontiff’s own determination — alongside the investigation and dissolution of the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana in Peru.
The EL PAÍS investigation seeks to break through that wall of silence. In this new report on cases in the Americas, the identities of those who provided testimony are withheld, but the newspaper will share them with Church authorities if requested once an investigation is opened and the individual gives consent. Some of the accused could not be identified because the person giving testimony does not remember — something that is common in cases of child sexual abuse. Even so, their accounts contain details that may allow the Church to identify them.
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