There has always been one formidable adversary that any left-wing Spanish government has had to face: the Catholic Church. This is an institution that in Spain collaborated with the regime throughout the 40 years of the Franco dictatorship: from the legitimization of the 1936 coup d’état to securing economic and political benefits for itself and enacting the cultural and moral repression of society. Only in 2020 did Pope Francis manage to replace the leadership of the Spanish Episcopal Conference with a bishop who was moderate and not openly reactionary.

Thus, the breakthrough that the Spanish government secured on Thursday was a major victory: it managed to bring the Episcopal Conference to heel, which has accepted to pay reparations out of its own coffers to all victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. All of them: including those for whom the statute of limitations has expired, those who did not appeal to the commission set up by the Church, and also in the cases where there is no agreement between the parties. The bishops have accepted that the Spanish Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) will establish the amounts due for compensation.

The scourge of sexual abuse within church institutions in Spain, as in many other........

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