The Archbishop of Barcelona received the first alert about the Guinardó parish priest in 2022, dismissed it as a “moral matter” and referred him to a psychologist. In September 2024 he admitted that “an unresolved question” remained about the priest. The priest was arrested in November of that year.
The case of Father Jorge Alexander P., detained in November 2024 by the Mossos d’Esquadra for touching an adult and a minor, once again puts the spotlight on Cardinal Juan José Omella’s handling of the matter. According to El País, which reportedly had access to the full file, the Archbishop of Barcelona received the first alert about the priest in March 2022—more than two years before his arrest—and decided not to open any canonical process. In a second conversation with the same victim in September 2024, the cardinal himself acknowledged: “I have always been left with an unresolved question about this priest.”
Barely two months after those words, the Catalan police arrested the priest, who at the time was in charge of the parish of Mare de Déu de Montserrat in Barcelona’s Guinardó neighbourhood. He was removed from the post when the complaints came to light; they remain under judicial investigation.
The victim, an adult identified as J., appeared before Omella in March 2022. He told him that the priest had rubbed his erect penis against him without consent and showed him a video in which the parish priest masturbated during a video call with another young man, also an adult. According to J.’s account in the complaint he filed this year with the Archdiocese’s Service for Attention to Victims of Abuse (SAVA), the cardinal “did not attach much importance to the case,” told him it was “one person’s word against another’s” and recommended “a lot of prayer and attending Mass.” He did not offer psychological support.
The Archdiocese has always maintained that in 2022 the young man merely expressed a “complaint” and not a formal denunciation, and that it was an episode between adults. Omella treated it as a “confidence” and dismissed it as a “moral matter.” J. explains in his complaint that he did not formalise the accusation at the time in order “not to damage the image of the Church.”
The only measure taken, according to a document from the Archdiocese’s judicial vicariate, was to place the priest under the care of a Jesuit psychologist for observation and spiritual accompaniment. The vicariate states that Omella “took other measures to try to correct the priest’s conduct” and that the information provided by the victim “has been attached and taken into account in the criminal proceedings currently open” against Jorge Alexander for the touching of a minor. The same vicariate rejects J.’s claims against the cardinal.
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