Mois : mars 2026

Spain’s Catholic bishops and the Spanish government took another step Monday toward compensating victims of sexual abuse by clergy members who have died or whose possible crimes are too old to be prosecuted.

In January, Spain’s Catholic bishops agreed to let the country’s ombudsman have the final say in the church’s compensation of such victims. The government and Spain’s bishops signed paperwork Monday detailing how the new church-state reparation system, which takes effect April 15, would work.

The agreement, which envisages a one-year window for claims, marks a rare concession by the Catholic hierarchy. It’s aimed at resolving disagreements between the left-wing government and church authorities over reparations after victims criticized the church’s original in-house compensation proposal.

Archbishop Luis Argüello, the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said the text will not include number amounts for the compensation that sexual abuse victims could receive.

« We wanted to exclude references to scales and quantities; that’s not what this is about, » Argüello said. « We’ve planned for the teams to start working on how to do it, but the text doesn’t establish a range or a specific amount. »

While church authorities in many Western European countries have created compensation plans for abuse victims, either run by the church or independent experts, the Spanish process is unusual because of the involvement of the state itself in the process.

Justice Minister Félix Bolaños on Monday said that the system would evaluate reparations case by case, based on factors like severity, the victim’s age and the recurrence of the abuse.

« Criteria are set to arrive at fair compensation, which should not be determined by a single figure, » Bolaños said.

In recent years, the once staunchly Catholic Spain has begun to reckon with a decades-long legacy of abuse by priests and cover-up by generations of bishops and religious superiors, mainly thanks to the initial reporting by newspaper El País.

Spain’s Parliament tasked the country’s ombudsman to investigate and in 2023 the ombudsman delivered a damning 800-page report that investigated 487 known cases of sexual abuse and included a survey that calculated the number of possible victims could reach the hundreds of thousands.

Spain’s bishops rejected that estimate, saying its own investigation had uncovered 728 sexual abusers within the church since 1945. It said that most of the crimes had occurred before 1990 and that 60% of the aggressors were now dead.

Under the new agreement, victims can approach Spain’s Justice Ministry with their initial petition. The ministry will pass it on to the ombudsman, who will study it and propose a compensation package that the church’s committee will then assess.

If no agreement can be reached with the church and the victim, the case will go to a joint committee with representatives of the church, the ombudsman’s office and victims’ associations. If that committee can’t agree, the ombudsman’s decision will stand, Bolaños said in January.

On Monday, Bolaños called the agreement a world first in which « the state has the final say and the church pays the reparations due to each victim. »

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments March 24 in a case concerning a policy of turning away asylum-seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Sometimes called « metering » or the « turn back policy, » the policy of sending back some asylum-seekers who presented at the border was first sometimes used under President Barack Obama and later expanded during the first Trump administration before it was rescinded in 2021 by President Joe Biden’s administration. The second Trump administration has sought to reinstate the policy, which is not currently in effect amid ongoing legal challenges.

Reimplementing the policy would block asylum-seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil, where federal law would then allow them to seek asylum, which, if granted, would provide protection from persecution in their country of origin. Other efforts made by the second Trump administration to curtail asylum are facing separate legal challenges.

Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy and communications at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News, « The administration not only wants to deny asylum-seekers entry to the U.S. by shutting down the border but also deny them the chance to claim asylum unless they are on U.S. territory. »

« The practical effect of these policies is the withdrawal of asylum protection altogether, which is a violation of both U.S. and international law, » he argued.

Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a group that works to apply the perspective of Catholic social teaching in policy and practice to the U.S.-Mexico border region, told OSV News, « Over the last decade, we’ve seen the near complete undermining of asylum for people fleeing persecution and danger. »

« While in need of real reform, asylum was carefully crafted as a critical measure of protection to address the needs of refugees at our border, essential for meeting the needs of the vulnerable as well as the moral health and credibility of our country as a nation of immigrants, » Corbett said, calling the case « a bellwether for our commitment to both humanitarian protection and U.S. global leadership. »

A central question in the case is whether noncitizen asylum-seekers must literally cross the border in order to apply for asylum, or those who appear at the border and seek entry must also be allowed to apply.

During the arguments, some justices questioned whether the policy would incentivize irregular border crossing by requiring asylum-seekers to cross the border rather than present themselves at it, running afoul of congressional intent.

« Why would Congress privilege someone who illegally enters the United States? » Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked at one point, questioning if it draws a distinction « between the illegal entrant and the person who lawfully gets very close and wants to follow the rules. »

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether the policy should be sent back to lower courts since it is not currently in effect.

« Why wouldn’t we wait until we had an actual policy with real facts in the record regarding what’s going on? » she asked, adding, « It just seems to me that we have a lot of hypotheticals regarding how this policy may have worked in the past, how it’s possibly going to work in the future, but we don’t have a policy in effect right now that we can actually rule on. »

But Assistant to the Solicitor General Vivek Suri argued that the policy is « a tool [the Department of Homeland Security] will want in its tool box » and that the court should not leave it « to future uncertainty. »

Appleby said, « I think all sides would agree that the U.S. asylum system should be more efficient, but the nation should not address the problem by weakening its commitment to the protection of human rights. »

Catholic social teaching on immigration balances three interrelated principles — the right of persons to migrate in order to sustain their lives and those of their families; the right of a country to regulate its borders and control immigration; and a nation’s duty to regulate its borders with justice and mercy.

An amicus brief filed by the U.S. bishops’ conference in support of the migrants challenging the policy said, « The policy violates the obligation to care for refugees — a fundamental legal and moral principle that runs through nearly two millennia of Catholic faith, an international humanitarian consensus, and this Nation’s history. »

A decision in the case is expected by the end of the court’s term, which typically ends in June.

In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order lifting a 14-year ban on enforcing immigration laws at sensitive locations like churches and schools. It was part of a larger crackdown on mass arrests and deportations that instilled fear in immigrants across the country — and galvanized faith communities and leaders, who drew on a tradition stretching back to the Hebrew Bible to protect and advocate for immigrants. 

The crackdown reignited tension between the U.S. government and religious communities over immigration that has flared on and off ever since the birth of the « sanctuary movement  » in the early 1980s, when churches and synagogues began offering shelter and support for undocumented immigrants, believing they were obeying a higher moral obligation than U.S. laws. Today the movement continues — and is still led by clergy and religious groups — though the focus has shifted from offering physical shelter to providing aid to immigrants too fearful to leave their homes.  

The concept of sanctuary has deep biblical roots: the Bible’s « cities of refuge » where the accused could seek fair hearings; more than 30 Bible verses commanding Israelites to welcome strangers; and the Holy Family’s own flight into Egypt. « Jesus was a refugee. Migration, exile, diaspora. It’s not just here and there in the Bible; it characterizes the Bible, » said Lloyd Barba, assistant professor of religion at Amherst College and co-author of « Sanctuary in America. » « Some people say the Bible is a book by migrants for migrants. » 

In fact, from as early as the fourth century, church buildings have been considered places of refuge for people accused of crimes or who sought mediation in disputes, scholars say. That tradition continued through the Middle Ages and was largely respected by secular authorities. A similar conviction — that moral law outweighs unjust civil authority — animated Quakers and other abolitionists who defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to help enslaved people escape.

The modern sanctuary movement emerged in the early 1980s, when two men — John Fife, the pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and James Corbett, a Quaker rancher — began sheltering migrants who fled violence in El Salvador and Guatemala and made the perilous trek across the Sonoran Desert from Mexico.  

Because these Central American regimes were anti-communist, the Reagan administration backed them and refused asylum to most of their refugees while admitting refugees from communist countries at much higher rates. Arguing the Central Americans were instead economic migrants, many were sent back to their home countries, often to face persecution or death. Appalled, Fife and Corbett began to speak out. In 1982, Southside Presbyterian was declared a sanctuary church. 

Working with mainline Protestants, Catholics and Jews, Fife and Corbett soon created a network of about 500 churches and synagogues that sheltered and transferred undocumented people around the country — an operation they likened to the Underground Railroad. They argued that the federal government was violating the Refugee Act of 1980 and was behaving unlawfully. So rather than saying they were engaged in civil disobedience, they called it « civil initiative, » said Carl Lindskoog, an associate professor of history at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey and author of « Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System. » 

The Rev. Minerva Carcaño, a retired United Methodist bishop who was active in the sanctuary movement for decades and served as a pastor in Texas, New Mexico and California, said that as a girl growing up in Texas near the Mexican border in the 1970s and ’80s, providing shelter for undocumented people was common. « I remember my grandfather would show up quite often with someone whom he had met in the town square and had no place to go who would become part of the family, » said Carcaño, who considers Fife and Corbett mentors. « That was not just our family; it was many families. So, there was this sense of sanctuary in your own home because of your faith. » 

The movement essentially had two goals: To protect immigrants from arrest and deportation and « to change the public narrative and by doing so, to change policy, » said Alexia Salvatierra, a Fuller Seminary professor, co-founder of the Evangelical Immigrant Table and a leader in the sanctuary movement today. 

Soon sanctuary cities and even sanctuary states began to spring up, declaring they, too, would not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. In 1985, the U.S. government indicted 16 prominent figures in the movement, including Fife, Corbett, Fr. Ramón Dagoberto Quiñones — a Mexican priest in the border town of Nogales — Catholic Fr. Anthony Clark and Sr. Darlene Nicgorski, in the first of what came to be known as the « sanctuary trials. » Eight defendants were convicted the following year of smuggling and given mostly probationary sentences. But in the court of public opinion, the trial « backfired because there was so much support for the morality of what they were doing, » Lindskoog said.  

Also in 1985, a group of organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the government, American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh. In 1991, they reached a settlement that required the federal government to re-adjudicate asylum claims for about 300,000 Central American refugees, helping establish a new asylum process based on persecution risk rather than U.S. foreign policy.  

A new iteration of the sanctuary movement emerged in 2007, mostly in response to two developments. First, a bill that proposed turning undocumented immigrants into felons and criminalizing those who helped them passed the House of Representatives in late 2005, sparking widespread protests and opposition from many faith leaders. The bill never passed the Senate. The following year, Elvira Arellano, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, gained national media attention when she took sanctuary in a Chicago Methodist church to avoid being deported away from her U.S.-born son and publicly advocated for immigrants’ rights.   

This second iteration of the movement put more emphasis on creating community defense networks and advocacy, such as accompanying immigrants to ICE check-ins. It also shifted to protecting immigrants living in the United States for years or even decades, not recent arrivals. Movement leaders believe their activism contributed to the 2012 passage of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which protects eligible undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation. DACA has faced numerous legal challenges since then. In January 2025, a federal appeals court ruled that parts of the program were unlawful but allowed recipients to keep renewing their status while litigation continues.

With the surge in ICE arrests, new detention centers and deportations in recent months, as well as Trump’s executive order allowing for arrests on church grounds, providing sanctuary these days usually means supporting people afraid of leaving their homes, not sheltering them in church basements, says the Rev. Dwayne Royster, executive director at Faith in Action, an organization involved in immigrant justice work and other causes. Churches, synagogues and mosques across the country are hosting « Know Your Rights » sessions, delivering food to people stuck indoors and even accompanying them to the hospital.  

In Minneapolis, the Rev. Hierald Osorto, a Lutheran pastor of a largely immigrant congregation and the son of Salvadoran immigrants, says that even though many members of his church are afraid and some are unable to work, they have shown tremendous courage, perseverance and commitment to each other, delivering food, providing rides and gathering together.

Just seeing the members of his congregation show up for church on Sunday has been a powerful sign of bravery, resistance and solidarity. « There is a commitment in this community to be brave and say, ‘We’re going to figure out a way to remain united,' » he said, recalling how that spirit was evident when members cooked 315 tamales for a recent gathering. 

Houses of worship and neighborhood groups also have formed rapid response networks to counter ICE raids by showing up with whistles and filming videos, said the Rev. Michael Woolf, an American Baptist pastor in Evanston, Illinois, whose church has hosted an immigrant family from El Salvador for several years. Woolf says the buzz heard on the streets these days is, « Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe. We don’t need cops. We don’t need armed military police or ICE. We keep our neighborhoods safe. » 

In November, Woolf was among those arrested and roughed up while protesting for the closure of an ICE processing facility in Broadview, Illinois, and the release of all detainees. The experience gave him « a real appreciation of what state power and violence can do and how it can be used to tamp down dissent, » he said. « It clarified for me what this fight is all about. » 

Mainline Protestant churches and denominations remain the backbone of the movement, but there is active engagement from Catholic and Jewish congregations, Hispanic evangelicals as well as secular activists and organizations, pastors and activists say. « I’ve been doing immigration advocacy for over a decade, and I’ve never seen this many people have compassion and empathy and bring their faith tradition to bear and be willing to take risks, » Woolf said. « That’s the thing about the sanctuary movement — people risk a lot. » 

Religious groups have filed multiple lawsuits challenging Trump’s « sensitive places » executive order. They have also tried to minister to people in detention centers with mixed success. Woolf believes that Trump’s immigration policies and the stepped-up ICE raids are confronting people of faith with a moral choice of whether to side with the government or with a higher law. He sees it as similar to the way German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the « Confessing Church » resisted Hitler’s control and « nazification » of the German church in the 1930s.  

« I don’t think what I’m doing is illegal, » Woolf says. « What I’m doing is moral, and that’s more important than what the state has to say. And sometimes you just have to pick: Is the state right or is God right? So for me, I pick God. »  

Progressive Christian author Jim Wallis, who worked with Fife and Corbett in the 1980s by promoting their movement, agrees that American Christians are facing a choice in their response to the immigration crackdown. « This is our Confessing Church moment, » he says, pointing to Matthew Chapter 25 as Jesus’ « final test » of discipleship. « How we treat the stranger is how we treat Jesus. We have to take that judgment seriously. »