In the public presentation of the new protocol to compensate victims of abuse, the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Luis Argüello, spoke at length without the essential terms that abuse victims expect ever appearing. In more than an hour of intervention, there was not a single mention of investigation, evidence, witnesses, or truth in its sense of clarifying the facts. This is not a minor detail. When a system avoids the language proper to evidentiary activity, what it is doing is shifting its axis: from investigating to managing, from clarifying to compensating. And that shift is not innocuous.
The signing of the protocol between the Episcopal Conference and the State, which assigns to the Ombudsman the management and quantification of compensations for victims of abuse in prescribed cases, cannot be analyzed solely as an economic reparation measure. In reality, it introduces a fundamental alteration in the balance between justice, truth, and responsibility within the Church’s institutional response.
From a legal perspective, the measure presents an evident duality. On one hand, it opens a path of recognition for victims who for years have remained in opaque procedures, without effective information, without access to their own files, and, in too many cases, without minimal legal assistance. This is the frustrating experience we have lived through those of us who have been intervening in canonical procedures attempting to assist victims of abuse.
But precisely because of that, the new framework raises a deeper question: what place does Canon Law now occupy, and in particular, instruments like Vos Estis Lux Mundi? This legal text promulgated by Pope Francis was the articulation of a concrete normative system that obligated investigation, the purging of responsibilities, and the guarantee of accessible and verifiable channels for reporting abuses in the Church. Alongside it, the entire subsequent development of canonical norms had configured—at least on paper—a procedural framework oriented toward helping to clarify the material truth of the facts.
The doubt is whether that framework is now displaced or, in practice, neutralized. If the institutional response is channeled primarily through an administrative mechanism for economic quantification, there is a risk that canonical investigation will lose centrality or even be emptied of real content.
For a victim of childhood sexual abuse, economic reparation is not the main element. The damage suffered is not comparable to other compensable harms. It is a structural breakdown of the person, affecting their identity, their relationship with authority, and their vital development. Pretending that this damage is primarily compensated with an economic amount implies not understanding the nature of the trauma. Nor does a chat with their bishop, in which he shows support with a sorrowful face, provide absolutely anything to the victim.
What the victim seeks—and needs—is truth. Accredited truth, investigated, reconstructed with rigor. They need to know that what happened does not remain in the realm of the debatable or the doubtful, but has been the object of a serious analysis, with the practice of evidence, with identification of contexts, witnesses, patterns of conduct. The Church, precisely because of its structure, has means that no other actor possesses: archives, agendas, assignments, communities, management of places, personal relationships. It has the real capacity to reconstruct what happened with a depth that exceeds that of many prescribed civil or criminal processes.
And this dimension acquires even greater relevance due to the very nature of the aggressor. The priest is not just any subject. He is usually a moral leader, a reference figure, someone who has built a community around himself that recognizes him, protects him, and, in many cases, resists accepting any accusation. That context generates a radical asymmetry: the victim not only carries the trauma, but also the suspicion, the questioning, and, at times, the rejection from those surrounding the aggressor.
If there is no exhaustive investigation, with all available means, the risk is evident. The victim may be exposed to a second victimization: being perceived as someone who resorts to a compensatory mechanism without a formally established truth. In that scenario, the narrative becomes distorted and slides toward a perverse interpretation: that of someone seeking economic compensation without having accredited the facts. That suspicion, although unjust, finds fertile ground when investigation is weakened or disappears.
That is why the shift toward a model centered on compensation and a pat on the back in the sacristy demands extreme caution. It is not enough to recognize victims economically if at the same time the duty to investigate is diluted. It is not enough to quantify the damage if it is not clearly established what happened, who was responsible, what measures were taken, and whether they were sufficient. Without that process, reparation remains incomplete and, in certain cases, can even aggravate the damage.
The true risk of the new protocol is not its existence, but its possible use as a closing mechanism. If it becomes a way to avoid the deep investigation demanded by Canon Law—and that norms like Vos Estis Lux Mundi had attempted to guarantee—we will be faced with an apparent solution that sacrifices truth in favor of the administrative management of the conflict.
The priority cannot be inverted. First, truth. Then, justice in the broad sense. And only as a consequence of both, economic reparation. Altering that order does not resolve the moral damage; it can perpetuate it and even aggravate it.
*Javier Tebas Llanas is a lawyer for victims of abuse in Spain and Latin America