On the return flight of the Pope’s recent apostolic journey to Cyprus and Greece, a reporter for the Madrid newspaper El País gave the Pope a 385-page dossier on 1,237 instances of the alleged sexual abuse of minors in Spain since 1942.
Vatican spokesman Vatican Matteo Bruni confirmed that the Pope received the documentation and sent it to the “competent bodies” so that an investigation “could proceed according to current Church law.”
“It would be desirable that the accusations contained in the aforementioned report have greater rigor, since its content, very disparate in nature, makes it difficult to draw conclusions that could serve a possible investigation,” the Spanish bishops’ conference responded. “Especially when the names of the accused are missing, the years in which the abuses occurred or refers to deceased persons.”