Cardinal Blázquez: Church Came Late on Abuse
On the CEE’s anniversary podcast he cites the 2019 summit, Benedict’s “filth” warning, and vows no rollback on safeguards as family life weakens.
On October 29, 2026, the Spanish Episcopal Conference released the second episode of a video-podcast series marking its 60th anniversary. In it, Cardinal Ricardo Blázquez, emeritus archbishop of Valladolid and former conference president (2005–2008 and 2014–2020), said the Church was late in confronting sexual abuse.
Recalling the February 2019 meeting Pope Francis convened with presidents of bishops’ conferences worldwide, Blázquez said the gathering made the gravity of the problem unmistakable and showed how inadequate earlier responses had been. “Probably all of us had arrived late to this question,” he stated, extending the delayed awareness to families and other sectors of society.
He pointed back to Joseph Ratzinger’s Good Friday 2005 Way of the Cross meditations, in which the future Benedict XVI denounced the “filth” within the Church—a warning whose full weight, Blázquez said, was grasped only gradually. Abuse, he insisted, is not confined to the sexual sphere: it can also involve the improper exercise of authority, power, and conscience. “Sometimes one abuse brings others with it.”
Safeguards and Secularization
Blázquez said he has met victims and their relatives and that the Church in Spain has taken important steps. Asked whether those measures could be rolled back, he answered flatly: “There is no turning back.”
On secularization he observed: “The Church could no longer count on society being Catholic.” The process, he added, now reaches “one’s own conscience” and a person’s “own interiority,” not only laws and institutions. He described a “de-institutionalization” of marriage already visible in several European countries and in Spain. “Since the family is the foundation of every person and of society as a whole, if the family is not well oriented and well founded, we all run many risks,” he said. “It matters enormously to all of us that marriage and family enjoy good health.”
His two wishes for the Church in Spain were more priestly vocations and stronger families.
Bilbao, Education, and National Concord
The episode also revisited his years as bishop of Bilbao amid ETA violence, including the July 1997 murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, whose funeral he presided over in Ermua. “Those days were terrible,” he recalled. He spoke of dealings with the Zapatero government over education and religious instruction, the rise of the tax allocation to the Church from 0.52 percent to 0.7 percent, and the 2017 Catalan crisis, invoking Adolfo Suárez’s epitaph: “La concordia fue posible.”