He Ombudsman has presented in Congress a report (which was published last year) on the clerical pedophilia in Spain. He has urged the deputies to compensate the victims as soon as possible, “because they are waiting for it and they need it”says. He knows what he’s talking about. He has been a priest. Or almost.
It’s been a long time since this news has bothered me, although I understand that it does for many other people. Not many people know that I was an abused child by a priest from my school. It happened more than half a century ago, I must have been around 11 years old. That man was crazy, a type of terrible fits of anger who hit the children with a stick of hockey, in front of everyone else. I wasn’t the only one he rubbed and rubbed in his office. It didn’t go from there. They kicked him out, I guess, or took him somewhere else, because he was clearly crazy. For some time the memory of that bothered me. Not today, and I only have a slight bad taste in my mouth from that story. Nothing else. I keep remembering to the majority of those Jesuits as a group of courageous braves that tried to teach us to think during the gloomy end of the Francoism. My gratitude towards them has not diminished over the years.
One day, with all naturalnessI told my father; Not too long ago, Mom was still alive. I was surprised that, also without the slightest drama, he answered: “Oh, yes? It happened to me too. And many others.” They attacked him in the 40s, at a time when the clergy had more power than anyone else in Spain; complaining would have been useless as well as dangerous. We talked about it for a while and then changed the conversation.
When all this began to be known, It never occurred to either of us to denounce that miserymore than anything because our stupid priests are dead, but it is completely logical that other people, many, seek reparation and demandAbove all, that such a thing should never be repeated. A large number of those children has not forgotten. They can’t. I don’t think there is any hatred or resentment in that. They just can’t forget it.
What caught my attention was the reaction of the deputies before the words of the Ombudsman, who as a young man was a Corazónista brother. As if the wind of the Spirit had suddenly blown over the room, all the deputies They agreed that this had to be fixed as soon as possible.. But this is what René Goscinny would have said: Everyone? No. On the extreme right, a small group of fools resist now and always to reality, to justice, to empathy and to common sense.
These people continue to maintain that Gabilondo’s report is biased and lacking rigor (have you read it?), which is at the service of its “half lackeys” and which “overstates” the facts. The document estimates that more than 400,000 children suffered abuse in their schools or parishes. It seems like a figure that is somewhat difficult to overestimate. Here that phrase that is so often misused comes from the mold: What would have happened to them, geez. Let’s see what they said.
When a party surrenders to populism rougher and tackierwhen they have no problem denying the evidence as long as they are talked about, when their entire strategy consists of go against whatever (in reality, so many times) to get a few lines in the news or a few minutes on TV, the question comes up alone: What are they there for? Don’t they realize the damage they do? Or do they not care?
I don’t know what the others will do. But I am convinced that those children we were, those of us who suffer from wheezing and bad breath and the disgusting words of those bastards that they put their hands on us, we are never going to vote for those people.
