'Are we going to have to pay in a pool format again?'

Ombudsman Angel Jabilondo presented his "Report on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church" to Congress. He analyzed the experiences of more than 480 victims and the responses provided by the Church itself (which note the "minimization of the problem") and by public authorities (due to the lack of "adequate procedures to prevent, detect and respond"). He therefore concludes that there is a need for a response to a situation of suffering and loneliness that has persisted for many years.

I don't doubt this, but I found that among the recommendations in the report, the Ombudsman points to the possibility of setting up a "public fund" to pay compensation. This 'fund' is akin to a bailout, but this time''to the Catholic Church, not the banking system. And what if they were required to return known illegal property registrations? Recall that there is still no resolution to this huge and dark story.

We are talking about a process - a concerted robbery by the Spanish Catholic Church - in which it registered properties in its name that were not registered in the Property Book. Since 1998, the church has registered a total of 34,961 properties in Spain thanks to the reform of the Mortgage Law by the government of José María Aznar. Of all the properties the church has registered in its name up to 2015, 20,014 are temples or ancillary premises, while 14,947 are plots of land, lots, residential houses, etc.

Obviously, government neutrality is a pantomime, as is the fact that political parties can only ask for refunds, never demand them. And if a political party decides to propose confiscation (even in the form of amortization), it will never win an election in Spain.

Let's remember a bit of history: in 1836, then Prime Minister Juan Alvarez de Mendizabal (also a banker) began''the process of forcibly confiscating the property of the Catholic Church in order to cope with the high costs of the war with the Carlists and as a last resource to replenish the working capital of the Spanish state after the loss of the colonies in the Americas. All these properties were then sold at auction to clear the state's accounts.

It should be noted that the "Depreciation of the Property of the Regular Clergy" was not unique to Spain or this time, but it had the greatest impact at this particular time. The confiscated properties belonged to the so-called "dead hands" belonging to the old regime and could not be sold or distributed, that is, they were "amortized" (hence the term "Amortization"). These were communal, noble'