Spain's reckoning with clergy abuse enters a new chapter as Pope Leo visits

Source: AP

By SUMAN NAISHADHAM
Updated 1:43 PM CDT, June 4, 2026
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MADRID (AP) — In the 1970s, in a devoutly Catholic Spain still ruled by dictator Francisco Franco, Paula Alonso-Pimentel was sent for catechism at age 8 to a religious school in the northern city of Valladolid.

There, she says, a Marist priest sexually abused her for a year in the school’s vestibule, placing her on his knees and lifting her skirt as students passed in and out. More than 50 years later, she is seeking reparations.

Spain’s long-delayed reckoning with sexual abuse within the Catholic Church entered a new phase this year with the launch of a reparations program for cases like Alonso-Pimentel’s that involve accused clergy members who have died and whose alleged crimes are too old to be prosecuted.

The Spanish bishops conference and Spain’s government approved the program months before Pope Leo XIV ’s planned visit starting Saturday to the once overwhelmingly Catholic nation of 50 million people. Notably, it gives the government the final word on payouts. Across the world, clergy sexual abuse and cover-up scandals have rocked Catholic dioceses, damaging the Church’s reputation and challenging the popularity of popes more than three decades after the crisis first erupted publicly in the West.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/catholic-church-spain-sexual-abuse-vatican-pope-leo-e4ddb452b0c96119c8ae1eae75172446