EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: . If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: .
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The Vatican Dicastery of Doctrine of the Faith has filed the case for alleged sexual assault of a minor in the nineties, when he was a priest in Getafe, as confirmed by ecclesiastical sources. Zornoza left his position last November after EL PAÍS revealed the case, the first that affected a Spanish bishop, once .
The decision to archive the case was made a few weeks ago, but the victim learned the news this Friday from this newspaper. He states that he has not received any notification and considers the resolution “a disappointment.” “More than outrageous, it seems disappointing to me that the Catholic Church has had an opportunity to repair and set an example and resorts to a technicality. I am not angry, because I do not expect anything from the Catholic Church. I am disappointed. The Church could carry out a healing process,” says the affected person.
The decision to archive the case is made by the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican disciplinary body, which received the file investigated in Spain by the Tribunal de la Rota. The details are still unknown, but the decision is based on a guarantee application of a legal technicality based on the alleged difficulty of determining the age of the victim at the time of the reported events. That is, if the complainant was over or under 16 years of age, which was then the limit of minority age according to the canonical code of 1983, the one in force at that time. However, according to the complaint, the abuse began when the complainant was 14 years old, so this information may have been questioned in the process.
In any case, even if the complainant was then a minor, applying the same regulations, the crime would have expired after five years, although the Church can lift the statute of limitations when it considers it appropriate, as has happened in many cases.
On February 18, this preliminary newspaper against Bishop Zornoza, who has always maintained his innocence, and sent a report recommending “opening a canonical criminal process,” according to the documentation of the procedure. EL PAÍS also reported that, during the months of investigations, several ecclesiastical witnesses came to testify before the judge, including one who was a direct witness of how Zornoza, on one occasion, was in the complainant’s bed and lying on him.
Last summer, the complainant wrote directly to Rome to Doctrina de la Fe, which considered the complaint credible and ordered the archbishopric of Seville, on which the bishopric of Cádiz and Ceuta depends, to open a preliminary investigation. The Sevillian diocese referred him to the Rota Tribunal.
“I write this letter only with the intention of preventing what happened to me from happening to another child,” said the complainant in the first lines of his letter. In his story, he described that Zornoza abused him from the ages of 14 to 21. The events described date back to 1994, when Zornoza was 45 years old and directed the major seminary of the diocese of Getafe, created only three years earlier after the division of the archdiocese of Madrid into several bishoprics.
“From the age of 14 until I came of age, 18 years old, I went almost every weekend to the Major Seminary of Cerro de los Ángeles. During this time he abused me. It was at night when he came to the room and suffered the abuse. He got into my bed, caressed me and kissed me. In the mornings he also woke me up in the same way. At those times I never said anything to him, the paralysis controlled me,” is detailed in the complainant’s letter. The abuses reported – touching, caressing private parts and kisses on the mouth – also took place in social gatherings and camps.
When the complainant turned 18 he entered the seminary and claims that the attacks continued at the center that Zornoza directed. “At the same time, I acknowledged my homosexuality. Rafa allowed me access to the seminary and took me to conversion therapy to heal my homosexuality”, the former seminarian explains in the letter. In the two years he spent in that seminary, he claims, Zornoza got into his bed “almost every night and morning” to kiss him and touch his private parts. It was in this context that one of the witnesses who have testified in the process saw how the now emeritus bishop of Cádiz and Ceuta is lying on the complainant.
“On several occasions I complained to Rafa that what we were doing was not right. He always told me that it was an intimate friendship,” the complainant wrote. He also told him that he “misunderstood their friendship.”
The former seminarian explains that Zornoza “had a high capacity for manipulation” over him. “He knew absolutely everything about me and I blindly trusted what he told me,” he said in his letter, where he added: “Another example of the ability to manipulate and control me were the confessions.” In them, the complainant also reported that he had a great feeling of guilt “and he made me see that I was not capable of loving or understanding a friendship.” “After confessing my homosexual acts, I went to bed and a few minutes later he got into my bed and caressed me,” he says.
The victim’s testimony shows that, in addition to the sexual assaults, the now prelate used his position of power to deceive him, abuse him and blame him for what was happening. “He convinced me to enter the seminary and told me that ‘my wound’ (that’s how he referred to my homosexuality) didn’t let me see things and to trust him. He also convinced me to go to a psychiatrist twice a week to heal my wound, my homosexuality. Neither my homosexuality nor the fact that I was going to therapy allowed me to share it with anyone, not even with my parents, family or friends.”
The affected person added in his letter that, after leaving the seminary, he was not aware of having suffered abuse and it was a few years later, while receiving therapy, when he understood that Zornoza sexually assaulted him. “When I was 32 years old I wrote him a mail where I told him that he abused me. I never received a response and, from that day on, he never contacted me again,” says the person affected.
Last year, the affected person also detailed, he stayed in Cádiz with the accused. “This time in person I told him again that he had abused me from the age of 14 to 21. He simply told me that it was never his intention, although he acknowledged the manipulation and abuse,” he writes in the letter.
