Defensor del Pueblo Report on the Catholic Church

Spain's reckoning with clergy abuse came not from a church commission or a criminal grand jury but from a constitutional office: the Defensor del Pueblo, the national Ombudsman, whose job is to investigate complaints against public institutions on Parliament's behalf. In 2022 the Congress of Deputies asked the office to turn that mandate on the Catholic Church.

Over the following eighteen months, Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo's team did two distinct things, and the resulting report, presented to Congress in October 2023, is careful never to blur them into one number. First, investigators worked directly with alleged victims who came forward, examining 487 individual cases between July 2022 and October 2023. Second, the office separately commissioned a population survey, 8,000 respondents drawn to be nationally representative, and used it to extrapolate a much larger figure: as many as 440,000 people in Spain may have experienced sexual abuse connected to the Catholic Church across recent decades.

The report states plainly which number is which. The 487 cases are individually investigated; the 440,000 is a statistical estimate of a hidden population, the same kind of figure France's CIASE commission produced from its own survey two years earlier. Gabilondo's own conclusion was less about the count than about the pattern behind it: the church's historical response, he wrote, had too often been to minimize the problem rather than confront it.