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MADRID (AP) \u2014 Spain’s Catholic bishops and the Spanish government took another step Monday toward compensating victims of sexual abuse by clergy members who have died or whose possible crimes are too old to be prosecuted.<\/p>\n
In January, Spain\u2019s Catholic bishops agreed<\/a> to let the country\u2019s ombudsman<\/a> have the final say in the church\u2019s compensation of such victims.<\/p>\n The agreement, which envisages a one-year window for claims, marked a rare concession by the Catholic hierarchy. It’s aimed at resolving disagreements between the left-wing government and church authorities over reparations after victims criticized the church\u2019s original in-house compensation proposal.<\/p>\n On Monday, the government and Spain’s bishops signed paperwork detailing how the new church-state reparation system would work.<\/p>\n Archbishop Luis Arg\u00fcello, the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said that the system would come into effect April 15. The text doesn’t include number amounts for the compensation that sexual abuse victims could receive, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to exclude references to scales and quantities; that\u2019s not what this is about,\u201d Arg\u00fcello said. \u201cWe\u2019ve planned for the teams to start working on how to do it, but the text doesn\u2019t establish a range or a specific amount.\u201d<\/p>\n While church authorities in many Western European countries have created compensation plans for abuse victims, either run by the church or independent experts, the Spanish process is unusual because of the involvement of the state itself in the process.<\/p>\n Justice Minister F\u00e9lix Bola\u00f1os on Monday said that the system would evaluate reparations case by case, based on factors like severity, the victim’s age and the recurrence of the abuse.<\/p>\n “Criteria are set to arrive at fair compensation, which should not be determined by a single figure,\u201d Bola\u00f1os said.<\/p>\n In recent years, the once staunchly Catholic Spain has begun to reckon with a decadeslong legacy of abuse by priests and cover-up by generations of bishops and religious superiors, mainly thanks to the initial reporting by newspaper El Pa\u00eds.<\/p>\n Spain\u2019s parliament tasked the the country’s ombudsman to investigate and in 2023 the ombudsman delivered a damning 800-page report<\/a> that investigated 487 known cases of sexual abuse and included a survey that calculated the number of possible victims could reach the hundreds of thousands.<\/p>\n