The Oeiras City Council today made itself available to receive the organization that placed the poster denouncing sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church, meanwhile removed by the municipality, and find a solution to put it back legally.
“Today, at the end of the afternoon, we can find a solution to put the screen urgently, if necessary during the dawn”, assured the vice-president of the Chamber of Oeiras, in the district of Lisbon.
Speaking to the Lusa agency, Francisco Rocha Gonçalves, stressed that the municipality is associated with the victims and the cause, which he considers “very important” and of public interest.
One of the three posters denouncing sexual abuse of children in the Portuguese Church, placed in Algés, in the municipality of Oeiras, was removed by order of the municipality for being “illegal advertising”, since all illegal advertising in the municipality is removed, justified the municipality.
According to the vice-president, the Oeiras City Council is available to provide a public structure of the municipality free of charge where the poster is placed, as long as the legality is respected, regretting that the group that promoted the placement of the posters did not contact the municipality.
“We don’t know who it is [the group that promoted the placement of the posters], because we were never formally contacted by them”, he stressed, reiterating that the panel where the poster was posted is not licensed for that purpose and that the municipality should have been previously informed.
The posters in question, which read “More than 4,800 children abused by the Catholic Church in Portugal” in English, illustrated by 4,800 dots representing each of the victims, were put up in the early hours of Wednesday in Lisbon, Loures and Algés.
The idea for the “This is our memorial” movement was born on Twitter and the promoters did some fundraising to get the posters up.
The initiative of this group of people emerged on social media before World Youth Day (WYD).
The Portuguese Atheist Association (AAP) considered today that the removal of the poster is an act of censorship and subservience of the executive to the Catholic Church, claiming that the problem “was never the structure or its legality, but the message contained in the poster”.
Urged by Lusa to react to these statements, the vice-president of the Oeiras City Council refused that it is a question of censorship, reaffirming that it is only a matter of compliance with legality.
In November 2021, more than two hundred Catholics argued that the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference (CEP) should “take the initiative to organize an independent investigation into sexual abuse crimes in the Church”.
A few days later, child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht was appointed by the CEP as coordinator of the Independent Commission for the Study of Child Abuse in the Church.
The testimonies refer to cases that occurred between 1950 and 2022, the timeframe covered by the commission’s work.
In the report, the commission warned that the data collected in church archives on the incidence of sexual abuse “should be understood as the ‘tip of the iceberg'” of this phenomenon.
Following these findings, some dioceses have cautiously removed priests from ministry.
