The Bishop of Bilbao identifies 14 alleged abusers among his clergy
The investigation commission created by the bishopric of Bilbao has identified fourteen priests as alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse, Bishop Joseba Segura has revealed. “The 14 cases of sexual abuse do not seem few to me, but I know there are more,” explained the prelate in an interview on Radio Euskadi. However, he has stressed that, compared to other Churches in the world, he does not believe that the proportion of “predators” is so great, referring to Ireland and the United States.
He also lamented that many of these cases “will never be known, either because the victims do not want to talk or because they have been lost.” “The important thing is to give the victims the opportunity to express their story, do not doubt their truth and recognize their courage to tell it,” he stressed, as reported by EFE.
On the investigation of the Ombudsman, the bishop has assured that the Bilbao diocese “fully collaborates” with that institution and has set the goal that public opinion “does not get the perception that we hide information.”
Joseba Segura has also spoken about the Gaztelueta case, an Opus Dei school in Biscay with a teacher convicted of sexually abusing a student. The Bishop of Bilbao declares that in a similar situation he would try to get the teacher to acknowledge the facts, and adds that he would write a letter with “different terms”: “I would have written another letter, I would have tried to get the teacher to acknowledge what happened, not has done, and I would have approached the family… but Opus Dei has great autonomy». “The leadership of Opus Dei says that it respects the Judicial Sentence, but considers that they cannot force the professor to recognize what he says has not happened,” he explains.
He has reported that he had a meeting with the student’s parents and after listening to them he has no doubt that “what they experienced was terrible”: “Someone cannot invent something like that, in addition to the teacher’s responsibility being confirmed by sentence.”