Spain has moved a step closer to investigating allegations of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
On Tuesday, the Spanish parliament agreed to examine a proposal for an inquiry, after years without a large-scale probe.
The Spanish Catholic Church has so far refused to set up an independent commission, despite acknowledging more than 200 existing abuse claims over the past twenty years.
A separate 2018 report by El País has listed 1,246 victims of sexual violence by the Church since the 1930s.
The request for an investigation was made by Podemos -- a coalition partner -- as well as smaller left-wing pro-independence parties.
Meanwhile, Spain's Attorney General's Office has asked the country's 17 senior prosecutors to refer all complaints about sexual abuse in the Church within the next ten days.
The move to centralise all open cases is another unprecedented step towards an official investigation.
Unlike other countries -- such as France, Germany, and Ireland -- Spain has failed to officially examine claims of paedophilia against members of the Catholic Church.
The parliament proposal for an inquiry will soon be voted on -- with a date yet to be set.
"We are going to do it, and we are going to do it well," government spokeswoman Isabel Rodríguez told a press conference on Tuesday, adding that the executive was looking for "the best possible solution".
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Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been criminally charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery, for allegedly sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy in 1974.
In 2018, the Vatican opened an investigation into the serial homosexual abuse of the former U.S. cardinal leading to a guilty verdict and laicization or “dismissal from the clerical state.”
Prior to his canonical trial, Pope Francis had accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the college of cardinals after revelations of sexual impropriety and abuse spanning decades.
The 91-year-old McCarrick was never tried until now of sexual abuse in a criminal court because his alleged crimes took place outside state statutes of limitation.
By Massachusetts law, however, where McCarrick has been charged, the process was allowed to go forward because McCarrick was not a state resident and by leaving the state, the statute of limitations was effectively suspended.
McCarrick is charged with having sexually assaulted a 16-year-old-boy during a 1974 wedding reception at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The wedding reception in question was the alleged victim’s brother’s.
The alleged victim claims that McCarrick was a family friend, asserting that McCarrick molested him on numerous occasions on family trips to several states.
“We will look forward to addressing this case in the courtroom,” Barry Coburn, a lawyer for Mr. McCarrick, said in a statement.
In 2020, a lawsuit was brought against the former cardinal, alleging he ran a sex abuse ring of underage boys at his New Jersey shore house in the 1980s.
The unidentified man who filed the lawsuit claimed that in 1982 and 1983, when he was a 14-year-old, he and other victims would go on overnight trips to McCarrick’s beach house in Sea Girt.
