The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said Tuesday that the Catholic Church has the «ethical duty» to take responsibility for the 4,815 victims who suffered sexual assaults within the institution, noting that this latest figure that has been released is «much higher» than previous ones.
Rebelo de Sousa has thus valued the conclusions published by the independent commission in charge of investigating abuses within the Catholic Church, which puts the number of victims of these abuses at «at least» 4,815.
«That the Church has an ethical duty to respond, to take responsibility was already assumed yesterday. That ethical duty, which includes psychological support, is still very important for many victims years and years later, no doubt,» he said.
Questioned about the possibility of the Church compensating the victims financially, Rebelo de Sousa recalled that «several countries» have already done so, but he asked to wait for the position to be adopted by the Portuguese Church.
Speaking to the press from the Belém Palace in Lisbon, Rebelo de Sousa acknowledged that the latest figure given by this independent commission has far exceeded the previous ones, «probably surpassing everything that the Portuguese thought» when the investigation began, reports the Lusa agency.
«This number is much higher than the previous one,» Rebelo de Sousa recalled in relation to the more than 400 that were initially estimated. «For the time that the commission dedicated, as some of its members have recognized, it may still be a phenomenon that continues to be present in Portuguese society,» he said.
In this sense, he stressed that it is time for the Church as an institution to review its actions for the future, since although in «many cases» it was not aware of what was happening, on other occasions it did and «underestimated» it, believing that it was «an isolated phenomenon without any seriousness».
«In other cases it still took a long time to act, while in others it is still trying to understand what happened,» said Rebelo de Sousa, who regretted that in Portugal the response has not been more «decisive» and «rapid».
The report, drawn up by a team of experts led by the child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht and delivered to the president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, the bishop of Leiria-Fatima José Ornelas, compiles 512 testimonies, of which 25 have been sent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
According to the study, the sexual offenders are mostly men and 77 percent were priests. The largest number of cases occurred between the 1960s and 1990s, with «a quarter of the total reported between 1991 and the present».
As for the place where they were committed, the document points to seminaries, boarding schools and institutions of the Catholic Church, confessionals, sacristies and the parish priest’s house. The average age of the victims was 11 years old, and most of them were sexually assaulted more than once.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
