The Jesuit priest Francesc Peris, who has admitted to sexually abusing minors in Spain and Bolivia, will not ultimately be tried by Spanish justice, after the dismissal of the complaints that kept a criminal case open in a Barcelona court.
According to El Periódico, one of the two complaints being processed in Barcelona’s investigating court number 29 has been archived after the Prosecutor’s Office considered that the reported facts are time-barred. Moreover, it is the complaint related to the most recent abuses, committed in 2004. Judicial sources indicate that the second complaint, referring to events in 1999, will likely meet the same fate.
The investigating magistrate had initially considered that both complaints, filed by former students of Barcelona’s Casp school, could still be prosecuted. However, the criterion of the Public Prosecutor’s Office has closed the criminal avenue, which ends the last possibility that Peris be tried for these crimes.
Internal Confession and Before the Vatican
Francesc Peris, currently residing in a Jesuit community in Valladolid, appeared before the judge on two occasions during the past year, traveling from there to Barcelona. In both statements, he denied the facts in court, assisted by a lawyer hired by the Society of Jesus.
However, he has admitted the abuses in internal processes of the order and before the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican body competent in cases of sexual abuse committed by clerics. This has been confirmed by the Jesuits’ delegate in Catalonia, Pau Vidal.
In the internal scope of the Society of Jesus, there are more than twenty testimonies from former students who reported abuses committed by Peris in Catalonia alone. In addition, El Periódico has counted nearly a dozen police complaints related to this priest, whose abuses date back to the 1960s.
Transfer to Bolivia and Absence of Complaint
Peris was removed from teaching in 2005, after the order became aware of his conduct, but he was not reported to the justice system at that time. Subsequently, he was sent to Bolivia, where he worked as a teacher at the Juan XXIII school in Cochabamba for approximately one year.
The journalistic investigation that uncovered the case, featured in the documentary La Fugida (2024), states that the transfer to Bolivia occurred when the Society of Jesus already knew about the abuses committed in Barcelona. The documentary also addresses the case of another Jesuit, Lluís Tó, who died in Bolivia in 2017 after having abused numerous minors without ever being tried.
Judicial Impunity
The complaints that allowed the case against Peris to be reopened were filed after the broadcast of said documentary. However, the dismissal due to statute of limitations has generated a deep feeling of frustration among the victims, who see the judicial avenue closed despite the priest’s confession in the ecclesiastical sphere.
One of the complainants has expressed that the case would have allowed for some kind of reparation not only to the two identified victims, but to the entire group of people affected by the abuses committed over decades.
With the closure of this judicial investigation, Francesc Peris will not face a criminal trial, despite having admitted the abuses to the Church and the existence of numerous testimonies that document them.