As Leo the new Amerucan Pope , is learning about his new ‘job’, there is a first time for a lot of things he would prefer that didn’t come with the turf. This past Saturday, he accepted the resignation of an ailing Spanish bishop who is under church investigation for allegedly sexually abusing a young seminarian in the 1990s. The official one-line statement from the Vatican skipped all the details (surprise, surprise) and just said Leo had accepted the resignation of Cádiz Bishop Rafael Zornoza, 76
It had been reported earlier this month that Zornoza had been recently placed under investigation by a church tribunal. The El País newspaper, which since 2018 has exposed decades of abuse and cover-up in the Spanish Catholic Church, said Zornoza was accused of abusing a young former seminarian while he was a young priest and directed the diocesan seminary in Getafe.
The report, quoting a letter the former seminarian wrote the Vatican over the summer, said Zornoza fondled him and regularly slept with him from when he was 14-21 years old. The former seminarian’s letter said Zornoza heard his confession and persuaded him to see a psychiatrist to “cure” his homosexuality.
It is believed to be the first publicly known case of a bishop being retired, and being placed under investigation for alleged abuse abuse, since the Spanish church began reckoning in recent years with a decades-long legacy of abuse and cover-up that have rocked the once-staunchly Catholic Spain
Two years ago, Spain’s first official probe of abuse indicated that the number of victims could run into hundreds of thousands, based on a survey that was part of a report by the office of Spain’s ombudsman. The ombudsman conducted an 18-month independent investigation of 487 cases involving alleged victims who spoke with the ombudsman’s team. That didnt sit well with the Bishops who argued that many more people had been abused outside of the church. However last year the Spanish Catholic hierarchy then did its own report, saying in 2024 that it had found evidence of 728 sexual abusers within the church since 1945. It then launched a plan to compensate victims, after Spain’s government approved a plan to force the church to pay economic reparations.
Whilst we are on the subject of victims, only last month we reported that jiunakist Evan Hurst on his substack THE MORAL HIGH GROUND, which is a substack by journalist He wrote nearly 200 anti-LGBTQ+ Christian leaders have been accused of child abuse this year alone
| N.B. The Catholic Church are by no means the only predators, BUT reading all their very precise details on WIKIPEDIA is nothing short of horrifying when you realize that these practices are still carried on and how very widespread they are. |
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