The coordinator of an independent commission that investigated the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church in Portugal on Tuesday described the hierarchy’s reaction to its report as “very ambivalent” and called for moves to waive the secrecy of the confessional “when there are overlapping issues” relevant to this question.
“The reaction was evolving, but very ambivalent and, from a certain point, I think it benefited from the effect of the group itself in general, because I also think that afterwards there were bishops who realised that if they did not participate, as others were participating, it would be difficult for them to admit this before the general public,” the commission’s coordinator, Pedro Strecht, said at a hearing of pariament’s committee on constitutional affairs, rights, freedoms and guarantees, called at the request of the Chega, Socialist Party (PS) and Social Democratic Party (PSD) on the commission’s final report, titled ‘Giving voice to silence’.
Strecht, a leading child psychiatrist, recalled that “in fact, the posture was often evolving and ambivalent, as if the study itself had not, for some, resulted from a request from the CEP [Portuguese Bishops’ Conference] itself.”
Asked whether or not the Church has sided with the victims, the psychiatrist – who was accompanied in the hearing by the other members of the Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse Against Children in the Catholic Church in Portugal, also said that he had “the greatest doubts about this.
“This study may in fact be the beginning of a new page in which, despite immense resistance within the Church, nothing will be as before … and, from the social point of view, we also have instruments to look at childhood in general and the problem of sexual abuse in particular in a different way,” he argued.
Strecht also stressed the importance of reviewing the secrecy of the confessional, noting that “it is also foreseen in other professional structures, including that of doctors themselves, when there are overlapping issues”.
Regarding the lifting of the secrecy of the confessional, another member of the commission, Álvaro Laborinho Lúcio, a retired senior judge and former minister of justice, acknowledged the existence of “enormous obstacles from the point of view of Canon Law and, at this moment, through the Concordat itself” – a reference to the agreement between Portugal and the Vatican.
“We understand that yes, in this aspect [of sexual abuse] but the issue here is a question of an absolutely internal decision of the Church and the question that has to do with dogma or not,” Laborinho Lúcio said.
It was, he said, “strange, however, that the reason that imposes secrecy in the absolute terms in which it is imposed in confession is not then confronted with the fact that confession also serves, in many cases, for the practice of sexual abuse in the very act of confession.
“But this is an issue that we have to work on from a more far-reaching perspective, involving the Church itself in this type of solution,” he argued.
The Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse against Children in the Catholic Church in Portugal validated 512 of the 564 testimonies it received over its year of work, subsequently extrapolating from this to a minimum number of victims of some 4,815.
Twenty-five of these cases were reported to public prosecutors, prompting the opening of 15 criminal investigations, of which nine have already been shelved and six are still under investigation.
The testimony refers to cases that occurred between 1950 and 2022, the period covered by the work of the commission.
