The Government has launched the office to process reparations for victims of abuses in the sphere of the Church. It is not just an administrative measure or a new technical procedure. Above all, it is the acknowledgment of a serious failure: that of an institution that has not known how to purify itself with the clarity, firmness, and transparency demanded by the magnitude of the scandal.
Bolaños himself explained in detail the scope of the measure after the Council of Ministers: “We have agreed to amend the Royal Decree on the Structure of the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes and we create the Office for Recognition and Reparation of Victims of Sexual Abuses in the Sphere of the Catholic Church.” The initiative, he recalled, is the result of the agreement reached on January 8 between the Government, the Episcopal Conference, and the Religious Conferences, later specified in a protocol with the Ombudsman signed on March 30.
A necessary agreement that evidences a weakness
The system comes into effect immediately. “Starting from April 15, all victims of sexual abuses within the Catholic Church will be able to go to the new model that we have created and which is overseen by the Ombudsman,” Bolaños stated, also emphasizing that the Executive will launch an information campaign to facilitate victims’ access.
No one can deny that this mechanism responds to a real need. For years, many victims found no response either in civil justice—due to the statute of limitations on the crimes—nor in the Church itself. It was essential to open a path that would at least allow the harm to be acknowledged and some form of reparation to be offered.
However, it is advisable not to confuse necessity with virtue. That this system is useful does not mean it is a cause for institutional satisfaction. Its mere existence reveals that the Church has not been able to guarantee on its own sufficiently clear, credible, and effective justice processes.
When the Church stops being the judge
The new model defines the roles precisely. “The Ombudsman has the final say,” the minister acknowledged, adding that “it is the Catholic Church that will respond economically or with any moral, psychological, or restorative reparation.”
In this way, the Church is left in a subordinate position: it assumes the consequences but does not direct the process. It is the Ombudsman who “will make the decision assisted by a victims’ unit made up of top-level professionals.”
A scenario with crossed interests
It would be naive to ignore that the State does not act in a neutral vacuum. The Government has its own interests, its own narrative, and its own political agenda, and this initiative is also inscribed in that framework.
But reducing the analysis to that bias would be a way of evading the core issue. The problem is not, first and foremost, the State’s intervention. The problem is that this intervention has become necessary.
If the Church had responded with clarity from the beginning, it would hardly have reached this point.
Humiliation as a symptom of a deeper crisis
not knowing how to purify itself nor to administer justice with the required firmness, accumulating over the years opaque procedures, late responses, and deficient management with the firmness that its own mission demands.
For years, opaque procedures, late responses, and deficient management have eroded trust to the point of making external intervention inevitable. When an institution needs to resort to political power to guarantee justice, what it is acknowledging is that its own mechanisms have failed.
But there is more. In its attempt to avoid conflict and seek acceptance in the dominant cultural climate, part of the Church has opted to dilute its own identity. The result is evident. The more it yields, the more authority it loses. The more it seeks recognition, the more it exposes itself to external pressure. And the more it renounces exercising its own responsibility, the more it depends on others to exercise it for it.
A pending purification
The Church can—and in this case must—collaborate with civil authorities to guarantee justice for the victims. But it cannot turn that collaboration into a permanent substitution for its own responsibility.
Because the purification of the Church cannot come solely from outside. It requires an internal exercise of truth, justice, and conversion that is not resolved with offices or administrative procedures.
If that process does not take place, the consequence is inevitable: others will end up doing what the Church has not done.
And when that happens, we are no longer facing a reform. We are facing the symptom of a decay that has not been addressed in time.