Jesuits admit decades of sex abuse

The Society of Jesus in Spain said in its report published Thursday that the internal probe confirmed that 96 members had been accused of sex abuses since 1927, the year of the first recorded case.

MADRID — The first comprehensive internal inquiry on sex abuse allegations by a religious order in Spain has identified 81 children and 37 adult victims of 96 Jesuits since the late 1920s, a much higher number than the cases that had so far been publicly known.

Associations of victims are welcoming the disclosure, but they see it falling short since the names of perpetrators or those who covered up the abuses weren’t disclosed. They also want the Jesuits’ inquiry to lead to proper criminal cases against the few abusers who are still alive and a detailed plan to compensate their victims.

“It’s a timid measure that goes in the right direction, but it falls too short,” Miguel Hurtado, a spokesman with the Stolen Childhood Association, said Friday.

Jesuits is how members of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic religious order formed in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, are commonly known. According to its website, the order runs 68 schools with some 75,000 students in Spain as well as half a dozen universities and higher education centers.

The Society of Jesus in Spain said in its report published Thursday that the internal probe confirmed that 96 members had been accused of sex abuses since 1927, the year of the first recorded case. For 65 of the Jesuits, the accusations involved underage victims.

The disclosure by the Spanish Jesuits comes as Pope Francis, the church’s first Jesuit pope, has tried to sensitize the church around the globe to the problem of clergy abuse and passed laws to hold the hierarchy accountable for covering it up.

As with other religious groups that specialize in education, the report shows that Jesuit-run schools became ripe hunting grounds for predator priests given that they provided a steady supply of victims. Most of the abuse found took place in or was related to schools, the Spanish Jesuits said.

Only 17 of the perpetrators involving minors are alive, and the 13 of them that remain linked to the Jesuits have been either punished or are awaiting results of criminal or internal investigations, the order said in its report.

The cases recorded stem from allegations, witness accounts and media reports, it said, and range from inappropriate verbal remarks to instances of sexual abuse and rape.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper said that in its investigation of clergy sex abuse cases since 1986, only eight of 123 alleged perpetrators had been Jesuits until the order’s disclosure this week. The revelation, the paper said, is “a blow for the few statistics known about minors’ abuse by the Catholic church in Spain.”