The Archbishop of Barcelona received the first alert about the Guinardó parish priest in 2022, dismissed it as a “moral matter” and referred him to a psychologist. In September 2024 he admitted that “an unresolved question” remained about the priest. The priest was arrested in November of that year.
The case of Father Jorge Alexander P., detained in November 2024 by the Mossos d’Esquadra for touching an adult and a minor, once again puts the spotlight on Cardinal Juan José Omella’s handling of the matter. According to El País, which reportedly had access to the full file, the Archbishop of Barcelona received the first alert about the priest in March 2022—more than two years before his arrest—and decided not to open any canonical process. In a second conversation with the same victim in September 2024, the cardinal himself acknowledged: “I have always been left with an unresolved question about this priest.”
Barely two months after those words, the Catalan police arrested the priest, who at the time was in charge of the parish of Mare de Déu de Montserrat in Barcelona’s Guinardó neighbourhood. He was removed from the post when the complaints came to light; they remain under judicial investigation.
A “confidence” treated as a “moral matter”
The victim, an adult identified as J., appeared before Omella in March 2022. He told him that the priest had rubbed his erect penis against him without consent and showed him a video in which the parish priest masturbated during a video call with another young man, also an adult. According to J.’s account in the complaint he filed this year with the Archdiocese’s Service for Attention to Victims of Abuse (SAVA), the cardinal “did not attach much importance to the case,” told him it was “one person’s word against another’s” and recommended “a lot of prayer and attending Mass.” He did not offer psychological support.
The Archdiocese has always maintained that in 2022 the young man merely expressed a “complaint” and not a formal denunciation, and that it was an episode between adults. Omella treated it as a “confidence” and dismissed it as a “moral matter.” J. explains in his complaint that he did not formalise the accusation at the time in order “not to damage the image of the Church.”
The only measure taken, according to a document from the Archdiocese’s judicial vicariate, was to place the priest under the care of a Jesuit psychologist for observation and spiritual accompaniment. The vicariate states that Omella “took other measures to try to correct the priest’s conduct” and that the information provided by the victim “has been attached and taken into account in the criminal proceedings currently open” against Jorge Alexander for the touching of a minor. The same vicariate rejects J.’s claims against the cardinal.
The recorded 2024 conversation
Over time, and after learning new details about the priest’s behaviour (he had been seen in a convertible car with young men), J. decided to see the archbishop again. “It outraged me and I began to relive the trauma,” he writes in the complaint. The cardinal received him in September 2024. The young man recorded the conversation and demanded an account of the steps taken.
Omella explained that he had spoken with the priest about the video and that the priest had admitted the facts. “It was a bad moment he had, but he is in a good frame of mind,” he said, adding that the priest was repentant and that, in the psychologist’s opinion, it might have been a mere “anecdote.” Faced with the new revelations, however, the cardinal admitted his pending “question” and undertook to speak with the parish priest again because he was “not entirely clear” about the matter.
In that same meeting J. handed him a formal complaint letter. Omella amended it because, in his view, it implied that he had covered up for the priest, and encouraged him to go to SAVA.
The cardinal’s lawsuit against the victim
From that point the relationship deteriorated. The young man sent a burofax to the Archdiocese demanding answers, arguing that the institution had “done absolutely nothing,” and announced that he reserved the right to take legal action and would inform the apostolic nuncio. The cardinal’s response, a few weeks later, was to file a lawsuit against him for threats through lawyer Carlos Rey. The courts dismissed it on two occasions, finding no crime in the warning that he would go to “a higher ecclesiastical instance,” as became known last June.
Relieved of the burden of the lawsuit, which according to the documentation worsened his distress, J. decided to file a formal complaint in April of this year both for the touching and for the cardinal’s inaction. His goal, he says, is to “overcome” the situation, obtain “help” from the Church and, above all, prevent new victims: “If it had been taken into account, we would not have had to lament two new alleged sexual abuses.”
The case adds to a series of uncomfortable episodes for the Archbishop of Barcelona and former president of the Episcopal Conference regarding abuse matters. Last June, during Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain, Omella stated in an interview that cover-up cases belonged to “time immemorial.” The documents now known place the unresolved question in much more recent dates.