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Church sex abuse panel in Portugal unearths hundreds of cases

By Matthew Roscoe • Published: 10 Feb 2022 • 12:42

Church sex abuse panel in Portugal unearths hundreds of cases

Church sex abuse panel in Portugal unearths hundreds of cases. Credit: Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Church sex abuse panel in Portugal unearths hundreds of cases.


A CHURCH sex abuse panel in Portugal unearths hundreds of cases. The lay committee was looking into historic child sex abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church.
An announcement made by the Independent Committee for the Study of Child Abuse in the Church said that during its first month of work it received allegations from 214 people from people born between 1933 and 2006.
“This suffering is associated with feelings of shame, fear, guilt and self-exclusion, reinforcing the idea of lives where the sensation of ‘standing on the sidelines’ was always present,” the committee said in a statement on Thursday, February 10.
The committee, which officially started its work on January 1 and will report to the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference at the end of the year, says its task is to study what child sex abuse has occurred, not launch formal investigations.

Allegations came in from across the country, the committee said, as well as from Portuguese now living in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland, where there are large Portuguese immigrant communities.
The news comes on the back of former pope Benedict XVI’s high-profile failure to act on child abuse cases, in which an inquiry found he failed to act on four child abuse cases when he was archbishop of Munich.
Also, in related news, regional reports of child abuse in the Spanish Church have been received by the Attorney General’s Office.
So far, prosecutors in the communities of Asturias, Alicante, Extremadura, and Castilla-La Mancha, have already returned their reports, although no details have been made available.

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Written by

Matthew Roscoe

Originally from the UK, Matthew is based on the Costa Blanca and is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com.

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