The Catalan Trustee of Greuges (autonomous figure equivalent to the Ombudsman), Esther Giménez-Salinas, has opened an ex officio investigation into the sexual abuse denounced by former students of the Jesuitas Casp school in Barcelona, considering that “the institutions have not addressed these cases properly.”
The trustee recalled that, according to the information available to her, one of the Jesuits (Francesc Peris) was removed from his duties in 2005, as a result of “some inappropriate events that were denounced by a family”, of which he had knowledge of the management and the teaching staff “without the center intervening”. And he added that, subsequently, “more similar complaints” have been collected regarding other teachers.
Giménez-Salinas was alluding, in this way, to the recent information published by El País and El Periódico on the cases of Peris and Francesc Roma, another priest whom two former students accused of sexual abuse.. Last Tuesday, another former student from the Casp street school, a man who is now 40 years old, denounced abuses by the religious Peris when he was 15 years old before the Mossos d'Esquadra. An episode that is added to the attacks on various minors that the Jesuit would have committed in Barcelona and also during his stay in Bolivia in 1982.
The opening of the ex officio action of the Trustee of Greuges coincides with the announcement, by the congregation itself, of the contracting of the services of the law firm Roca Junyent. As explained this morning by the delegate of the Society of Jesus in Catalonia and president of the Board of Trustees of the Jesuits Education Foundation, Enric Puiggròs, the religious order intends, with this initiative, to “evaluate legal responsibilities” in possible cases of abuse due to pedophilia committed in the past within the institution and “assume them if necessary”. On May 22, 234 former students of the Jesuitas Casp school published a letter demanding a public condemnation of these alleged abuses.
In March 2022, the Congress of Deputies approved the creation of an advisory commission in charge of studying and preparing a report on sexual abuse in the Church and entrusted its leadership to the Ombudsman. At the end of last year, Parliament also set up an investigation commission on pedophilia in the Church.