The ordinary Justice refuses to take into account the sentence of the Church court that acquitted a pedophile priest
The Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha has refused to include a 15-year-old girl in the case regarding the priest convicted of continued sexual abuse the ruling of the ecclesial court of La Rota declaring him innocent. In an order of November 24, to which elDiario.es has had access, the judges consider that this resolution "is not binding" nor does it produce "any effect" on a fact that is subject "exclusively" to ordinary jurisdiction.
The Reverend José Luis Galán Muñoz was sentenced on July 26 by the Provincial Court of Toledo to eight years and six months in prison for continued abuse of a teenager who has accumulated countless suicide attempts since then. He was also sentenced to compensate the victim with 50,000 euros and not to come within 300 meters of her for 18 years.
The defense of the parish priest, who is still at liberty after appealing the sentence, asked to incorporate the ruling of the ecclesial court due to its "conditioning and / or decisive" nature among the allegations that he has presented before the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha and that is pending resolution. According to the brief presented by the lawyer for the pedophile, the resolution of the Court of La Rota of the Apostolic Nunciature deals with "the same facts prosecuted in the sentence that is the subject of this appeal."
The Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha has rejected this petition following the criteria of the Prosecutor's Office, which had already taken a position against incorporating the sentence of the appeal court of the Holy See with the argument that "it does not produce effect any "about a fact that constitutes a common crime. In their order, the judges recall that the priest's own defense "recognizes" in his petition that the ruling issued in the ecclesiastical way "is not binding for the ordinary jurisdiction."
The Court of the Rota, an ecclesiastical jury that opened its own procedure to the priest, declared on November 2 the innocence of the parish priest in a sentence that is riddled with irregularities and he despises the arguments of ordinary justice where the priest had already been sentenced. A trio of Church judges - Monsignor Antonio José Die López as presiding judge, instructor and speaker; and Carlos Morán Bustos and Jesús Rodríguez Torrente, as adjunct judges - accepted in their sentence all the defense arguments that had been rejected in the ordinary courts to try to amend the verdict of the Provincial Court of Toledo.
The ecclesiastical lawsuit acquitted the accused despite the fact that the court could not ask the victim - who gave all kinds of explanations in criminal proceedings but refused to appear before the religious court - after ignoring the considerations of criminal proceedings and giving good defense arguments that were discarded in the ordinary Justice trial, where there was a contrast of versions between the accusation and the defense, in addition to the appearances of forensics and independent doctors.
The Rota Court developed throughout its sentence a comparison between the lives of the victim and the aggressor. While she highlighted the "tense and unstructured family environment" in which she grew up, her relationships with two boys she met in dating applications or her "difficulty in relating to the male sex"; He presents him as the son of a working family, "with a good capacity for study" and a "happy childhood" who, due to his "good academic results", had "the opportunity to enter the Seminary." And she dismisses the relationship between the two as a coexistence between a young woman interested in the Church who had the priest "like a second father, as she liked to say."
Advised by the psychiatrist who had been treating her mental conditions for four years, the young woman took six years to file a complaint. This fact is used by the ecclesiastical court to maintain that the accusations were a revenge of the minor when learned that the priest and his mother were in a relationship. "The defendant can speak objectively of his past, can balance his positive and negative influences, and can reflect on the evolution of his understanding over time. His narration is firm and sure and is expressed clearly. He has been able to confess his immoral actions, such as the sentimental relationship he had for a few months with the mother of whom he is accused ", say the ecclesiastical judges.
The judgment of the Church court confronts the facts proven in ordinary justice, which describe a horror film that began on a school excursion along the Camino de Santiago during the summer of 2010. There began "a relationship of trust" between the priest, then 39 years old, and his 15-year-old student who led the next year to become his spiritual director inside the religious college where the youngest was in the fourth year of ESO.
In the proven facts, the Provincial Court of Toledo relates it like this: "As of January 2010 [el párroco] started asking [la menor] questions related to his sexual life, such as if it was pure, if he masturbated or if he had had sexual relations with boys, and then, in one of these encounters, he asked him insistently and with an obvious lustful spirit to kiss him. And although at first she refused, she finally agreed due to the consideration she had for José Luis Galán, whom she conceived as a personal and moral reference. In successive meetings, [el sacerdote] He proceeded to remove his clothes, simultaneously expressing that he was doing it because God was asking him to, later, touch his breast and kiss it. At the end he gave a hug to [la víctima] and he asked his forgiveness, telling him that this situation was not going to happen again and reiterating that he was doing everything in the name of God. "
Later, in successive meetings in the priestly office of the church of San Ildefonso in Talavera de la Reina, there were more touching, the introduction of the priest's fingers into the vagina of the minor, the invitation to perform fellatio and when the adolescent showed opposition , the warnings about "the goodness of these behaviors" that were, according to the parish priest, "a gift from God." There was even an exorcism, in which the priest who abused her tried to make her see that she was possessed by the devil.
And, as a result of all the above, there was also a spiral of suicide attempts and admissions to psychiatric clinics for the young woman, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, compulsive-purgative anorexia nervosa-type eating disorder and instability disorder emotional borderline personality. A decade after the first abuses, the young woman has not finished recovering.
Now it will be the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla La Mancha that decides on the appeal of the defense that asks to annul the sentence of the Provincial Court of Toledo.
