Spain's 440,000 abuse figure came from El País, not the ombudsman's report

The figure of 440,000 people allegedly abused in religious settings in Spain does not appear in the report that the Defensor del Pueblo, Spain's ombudsman, delivered on October 27, 2023. It is not in its 777 pages, in the survey behind it or in its conclusions. It was produced outside the document, on the day the report was presented. In the survey, 1.13 percent of respondents said they had been abused in a religious setting before the age of 18, and that percentage was applied to Spain's 39.4 million adults. El País did the multiplication.

Gabilondo, the ombudsman, expressly declined to extrapolate. In October 2024 he said his work was not a quantitative report but a qualitative one, and that he had not set out to establish the number of cases recorded in Spain. The calculation was the newspaper's own. It published 440,000 or 445,000 depending on the rounding, with no technical author behind it and no one answerable for it.

Three years later, the number is still cited as if it were a count of identified victims.

The survey category does not refer only to priests

The "religious setting" category in the GAD3 survey covers more than priests. It includes lay people working in Church institutions, most of them teachers at state-funded Catholic schools. That is why the 1.13 percent is double the 0.6 percent of respondents who attributed the abuse to a priest or a Catholic religious.

Applied to the 0.6 percent for clergy, the same operation would have given about 236,000 people. The percentage published was the one that nearly doubled that result, and it ran under a headline about priests. More than 200,000 alleged victims were added between page 166 of the report and the front page, with no additional testimony.

Ninety boxes ticked

With a sample of 8,013 people, about 90 ticked the box for a religious setting. The margin of error on a subcategory that small is wide, and multiplying it by 39 million widens the range to hundreds of thousands of people.

None of that was published alongside the number, which appeared to three significant figures and with no interval. No one verifies the accounts, or the definition each respondent applies to sexual abuse, a term that covers everything from touching to assault with penetration. The survey also asks about events from decades earlier, at the height of media coverage of the issue.

Two invented victims reached the ombudsman's report

In July 2022 a group of Catholics calling itself the colectivo Sergio Gámez invented a victim of that name and wrote to El País's inbox for abuse reports. The account described abuse by a catechist in a parish in Aluche, a district of Madrid, around 1991. The authors refused to meet in person, to be photographed or to have any contact other than email. No one asked for more.

The invented case went all the way through. The newspaper published it on July 7, 2023 and included it in one of the reports it handed to the Spanish Bishops' Conference. The ombudsman's report of October 27, 2023 carried it on page 246 as testimony 359 and apparently also as testimony 35, adding a duplication to the question of truthfulness. The Piarists, asked about the events, found nothing in their archives.

In May 2024 the same group revealed a second fictitious case, about a teacher at a Trinitarian school, also in Aluche. El País had already removed it from its website; the ombudsman's report still contained it. The ombudsman received the newspaper's files on four occasions, so the original error passed downstream unchanged.

Seven figures that do not measure the same thing

Spanish Bishops' Conference, Para dar luz: 806 cases; cases with an identified accused recorded by dioceses and religious congregations; December 2023; verified internally, by the conference itself.

Ombudsman's Victims Unit: 487 victims; testimonies gathered in interviews for the report; October 2023; personal interview, no external verification.

Victims Unit, updated: 674 victims; the earlier 487 plus 188 later testimonies accepted as valid; October 2024; personal interview, no external verification.

Cremades y Calvo Sotelo audit: 1,383 complaints and 2,056 victims; complaints aggregated from several sources, with perpetrators unidentified; December 2023; duplicates not fully removed.

El País database: 3,081 victims and 1,613 accused; cases known from court rulings, media reports and the newspaper's own testimonies since 1927; April 2026, sixth report; documentary and journalistic, with no external body.

GAD3 survey for the ombudsman: 0.6 percent of the adult population; respondents reporting sexual assault by a priest or religious; October 2023; anonymous self-reporting, sample of 8,013 people.

GAD3 survey, wider religious setting: 1.13 percent of the adult population; respondents reporting that the assault took place in a religious setting, lay people included; October 2023; anonymous self-reporting, sample of 8,013 people.

The table shows why figures ranging from 806 to 440,000 circulate without contradicting one another: they answer different questions. The cases verified by the bishops' conference are files with an identified accused that have passed an evidentiary filter. The complaints and testimonies received are accounts given to a newspaper, a commission or an audit, with no independent verification. The extrapolated estimate counts no one; it calculates how many there would be. The confusion arises when the three are put in the same sentence.

The audit the bishops rejected

The Spanish Bishops' Conference commissioned an audit from the law firm Cremades y Calvo Sotelo in February 2022. The firm delivered it on December 16, 2023, about 10 months late, at 956 pages and a cost of around 1.3 million euros. It recorded 1,383 complaints and at least 2,056 victims.

The conference rejected it on the day it was published. It said the firm had counted separately the complaints recorded in the dioceses and the 305 reported to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, even though dioceses are required to send every case to Rome. Corrected for that duplication, the count fell to 1,302 complaints. The conference also said the work was a compilation of cases already published in earlier studies, with conceptual errors and no investigation of its own.

The 806 cases with an identified accused

The only Spanish count that applies an evidentiary filter is the bishops' conference's own, in the report Para dar luz. Of an initial block of 363 cases, 205 were proven, 70 were considered credible, 75 remained under investigation and 13 had passed the statute of limitations. To that block were added 118 cases presented only to the ombudsman, and further batches, reaching 806 cases with an identified accused.

From that comes the document's most disputed conclusion: that abuse cases in the Church do not exceed a thousand and are almost residual compared with those committed outside it. It is built on case files with names attached, not on a survey projection.

The 3.36 percent that no one multiplied

The GAD3 survey produced four percentages, and only one became an absolute number. Some 11.7 percent of respondents said they had suffered sexual abuse before the age of 18 in any setting. Some 3.36 percent placed it in the family, almost three times the religious figure. The 1.13 percent for religious settings is around 10 percent of the total reported. The family percentage was not multiplied by the adult population and did not reach any front page.

In France the proportion was similar: abuse in the Church, lay people included, accounted for 6 percent of all sexual assaults on minors, against 5.5 million French people who said they had suffered such assaults in any setting.

Spain compared with other countries

France, CIASE 2021: 216,000 victims of clergy and 330,000 including lay people; about 4,800 cases in Church archives; 1950-2020; Inserm survey of 28,000 people.

Portugal, 2023: at least 4,815; 512 validated testimonies; since 1950; extrapolation from victims mentioned by those who came forward.

Germany, MHG study 2018: no population estimate; 3,677 minors in archives; 1946-2014; archive review only.

Spain, ombudsman 2023: about 236,000 for clergy and 440,000 for religious settings; 806 according to the bishops' conference and 3,081 according to El País; no period specified; GAD3 survey of 8,013 people.

The denominator completes the comparison. The CIASE calculated between 2,900 and 3,200 abusers in France, or 2.5 to 2.8 percent of the 115,000 clergy of the period. El País estimates 1,613 accused in Spain out of about 110,000 religious and priests since 1940, or 1.46 percent, of the same order as the French rate and below it, according to the newspaper's own data.

Two channels and no cross-check

Since April 2026 two reparation channels have run side by side. PRIVA is the Church's own plan, answering to the bishops' conference and to CONFER, the Spanish association of religious congregations, with an independent advisory commission that has been working since September 2024 and began receiving applications in February 2025. The joint mechanism came out of the January 8, 2026 agreement between the government and the Church, and was set out in a protocol signed on March 30. Its processing office opened on April 15 for those who can no longer go to court because the offense has passed the statute of limitations or the perpetrator has died.

All those victims can use the state mechanism whether or not they have already received some form of compensation from the Church, and the ombudsman will take into account cases already settled by PRIVA. The same person can therefore appear in both registers. How many do is not known: neither side has published the cross-check.

September 2025, first year: 89 applications, 32 of them from dioceses and 57 from religious congregations; 39 rulings, out of 40 complete reports received.

Early January 2026: 110 applications; no figure published for rulings.

February 2026: 127 applications, after 17 new ones in a month; 76 rulings.

April 30, 2026: no application figure published; 83 rulings, with more than 2 million euros agreed.

April 2026, the latest figures released: 156 applications; 94 rulings.

That is the full record of the Church plan: 156 applications and 94 rulings in 14 months. Payments run from 3,000 to 100,000 euros depending on the gravity, the consequences and the circumstances of the abuse, plus past and future therapy costs and commitments from the institution responsible. No update has been published since April, so both figures may now be low.

The state channel moved faster. The processing unit of the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes received 300 applications in its first 15 days, twice as many as PRIVA had gathered in 14 months. As of August 3, 2026, the ombudsman's Victims Unit was examining 450 files, 149 of them at the final processing stage, with 105 individual interviews up to July 31 and only four cases ruled inadmissible for falling outside the protocol.

Period of activity: ombudsman's Victims Unit, since April 15, 2026; PRIVA, since February 2025.

Applications registered: Victims Unit, 300 in 15 days and 450 as of August 3, 2026; PRIVA, 156 in the April 2026 figures.

Progress: Victims Unit, 149 files at the final processing stage; PRIVA, 94 reparation rulings issued.

Personal attention: Victims Unit, 105 interviews up to July 31; PRIVA, no figure published.

Cases rejected: Victims Unit, four inadmissible; PRIVA, no figure published.

Money committed: the Victims Unit does not handle payments; PRIVA, more than 2 million euros from dioceses and congregations.

Victims present in both channels: no figure published by either.

The comparison has a limit worth stating: the ombudsman's 450 files are applications under study and PRIVA's 94 rulings are decisions already issued, so neither column amounts to a count of recognized victims. The Church plan takes about three months on average to decide a case from the moment it receives the institution's report. The ombudsman has the same maximum period for each application, extendable by a month if the volume or the complexity warrants it.

Each file in the joint system passes through the ministry's processing unit, an assessment by the Victims Unit and a reasoned report from the PRIVA advisory commission. If they agree, the proposal is final; if they disagree, a joint commission that includes victims' associations takes it up, and the ombudsman decides in the last instance. In April 2026 the Council of Ministers also approved a royal decree law exempting these payments from personal income tax, or IRPF, a request the Church had been making and which Minister Félix Bolaños had accepted in the January agreement.