Final Report of the Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse of Children in the Catholic Church in Portugal

A 486 page final report from an independent commission chaired by child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, commissioned by the Portuguese Bishops' Conference in late 2021 to examine sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church in Portugal from 1950 to 2022, but constituted and operated independently of the bishops who commissioned it. Released February 2023, the commission received 564 testimonies between January and October 2022, validated 512 of them, and reported that its own cross-referencing of validated testimony against known cases and records points to a minimum of 4,815 victims across the period, describing this figure as a floor rather than a ceiling. It found that 77 percent of identified perpetrators were priests and that the church hierarchy had systematically concealed abuse rather than reported it; only 25 of the cases it examined had been passed to public prosecutors, most others already outside Portugal's statute of limitations.