The document states that in the Church in Spain there are "environments traditionally endowed with a certain opacity where the identification of cases presents difficulties for various reasons."
The report also encourages the creation of commissions like those in Australia, the Netherlands, or Austria, and it calls for "avoiding the case first being checked out or internal filters applied by the institution where it occurred before it being reported to the competent authorities, and that without prejudice to the measures that the institution should or could adopt to prevent reoccurrences of similar incidents within the scope of its competencies."
In face of these accusations, Bishop Argüello explained that they learned of the report of the AG's Office "only through the media" and expressed their desire to have it in its entirety "in order to evaluate it," and stressed that "when they speak of opacity, I don't know what they are referring to."
"We are facing a matter of serious societal concern, we would like a dialogue with the AG's Office spoken of in the report. Because we are willing and everything we can do to join forces is good for everyone," the spokesman said.
The AG Office's report states that in 2017 and 2018 about 1,000 cases were recorded per year, while the convictions were around 500 in 2017 and 737 in 2018.
Argüello said they would like to know how many of these complaints and convictions were against members of the Catholic Church: "We would like to be able to know … how many of these verdicts were convictions and how many were acquittals and how many cleric there were. Our perception is that the clerics convicted in those two years were quite few, but we don't know and we would like to know. As we would like to know in what other sectors of society...We understand the reluctance of the AG's Office, because it prosecutes persons, not social sectors."