Traveling to the hell of pedophilia in a Renault Clio

What is a Renault Clio? For Leonor Paqué, it's her home, her documentary editing studio, her refuge, a tank with which she traveled to hell and heaven. But that small car—a white Phase II model—didn't become all of that until December 27, 2021. That day, Paqué told her devastating story in EL PAÍS : at the age of eight, she was admitted to the Santa Marina Children's Sanatorium in Bilbao with tuberculosis, and there she suffered abuse from a pedophile priest whose name she couldn't remember. That was 50 years ago, but the psychological after-effects remained as indelible as a tattoo. She was one of the few women who, up until that moment , had publicly denounced sexual abuse in religious settings .

Her fortitude and courage prompted others to come forward and share her story. Seeing their faces inspired her to go out and meet them: “I had to meet these people I didn't know. So I packed up my car, grabbed a video camera, and set off,” Paqué says passionately in a café in the upper part of Madrid's Embajadores neighborhood.

She didn't have the resources to make a large-scale documentary, and if that weren't enough, driving was something she'd always dreaded. So Paqué, a writer and journalist, asked her brother Diego for help converting her Clío into a space in just a few square meters, allowing her to live with Tinta, her inseparable cinnamon-colored mixed-breed dog. Diego, a musician and film director, suggested accompanying her to film the trip and direct the project. Since the car couldn't handle it, he would sleep in a tent. It was a journey into the unknown. In one of the first takes, in fact, Leonor is heard saying: "We don't know where we're going to end up." The journey lasted three years, visiting 32 destinations throughout Spain and loading the memory of their two cameras with dozens of hours of footage . The result of all this is the documentary Hermana Leonor. 20,000 Kilometers of Confession.

The film, awaiting release, is currently entered into various national and international film festivals. "We trust that a committed distributor will make the documentary available to as many people as possible, given its truthful and essential content," say its creators, who self-financed the idea through their small production company, Latiovisual. Filming, they say, was hard work, fraught with difficulties, but it has resulted in a valuable, unique archive, a snapshot of what the victims feel, brought to light by another victim. It is a fight in which a handful of boxers punch a heavy bag: that of silence, cover-up, and the re-victimization of the Catholic Church.

Paqué meets people she doesn't know, but with whom she quickly bonds. "I don't understand what was happening. It's like we connected. Like I was her sister," the journalist explains. What initially seemed like a single path transformed into a network of branching paths. One of them was that of Emiliano Álvarez, the first victim to come forward in the investigation this newspaper launched in 2018. The priest Ángel Sánchez Cao abused him between 1976 and 1978 at the San José de La Bañeza Minor Seminary in León. For him, this was "the burden of fear" he had to carry his entire life, which led him to heroin.

He overcame all that, and when Paqué interviewed him, he was still searching for justice, while suffering from terminal cancer and making up for lost time in his village, raising goats. “When I spoke to him in Borrenes, he said that it was after telling the story that he had begun to live. He told me: 'If I had died years ago, a junkie would have died. Now a person will die.'” Álvarez died in August 2022, three months after the interview.

Get burned again

Retelling the pain of abuse isn't easy. It's like being burned again by the embers of a memory that has never been extinguished. Paqué weaves together all the stories to create a collective memory, one that also includes her own, fragmented because she doesn't know the identity of her abuser. Part of that journey will help her find those fragments to piece together the whole truth.

In her interviews, the journalist delves into the depths of the problem: the truth of what happened, but also what continues to happen, how the Church continues to deny reparation in most cases . An example of this is the story of Óscar, who suffered abuse in the 1990s at the Zaragoza seminary of San Gabriel de Zuera, part of the Passionist order. He spent his entire childhood with the abuser and those who covered him up and was ordained a priest in the same order. After dedicating his life as a missionary in El Salvador, he reported what happened to his superiors a few years ago. They proposed electroshock therapy to "cure" his homosexuality, but denied him reparation. At the time of the interview, he was trying to leave the clerical state, but he has been unable to find a job outside the congregation and is not entitled to any unemployment benefits. "I am a priest in hell," he explains painfully in the film.

The 102-minute documentary describes how those affected live their daily lives with this wound. A 73-year-old woman tells Paqué that she named the abuse while at the cinema, watching Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education . She was 55. "That's what they did to me," she describes in front of Diego's lens.

On that journey, laughter mingles with scars, many of which are vestiges of a long recovery process. Regarding that healing, Fernando García-Salmones talks about the need to share his story, how therapeutic it was for him to name the rapes he suffered at age 14 by a Claretian monk at a Madrid boarding school. He also talks about the difficulties of managing this suffering while being homosexual, a sexual orientation that the Church has demonized throughout its history and linked to the pedophilia scandal. "It's difficult for society to grasp what happened to us," he says.

The documentary covers not only the meetings, but also the events that took place from the end of 2021 to the end of 2024: the Ombudsman's investigation, the scandals uncovered by the Church , and the bishops' meetings with victims at the headquarters of the Spanish Episcopal Conference. "What I want is justice," a mother of a victim who committed suicide due to the after-effects of having suffered abuse by a cleric can be heard saying at that 2022 meeting.

Paqué, along with Tinta and Diego, climbed into the Clío, converted into a camper van, to film a trip that could capture the truth about the abuses. “I consider storytelling a weapon, a valuable tool,” says the journalist. She drove thousands of miles to feel free, to try to bring that freedom to her interviewees, and now to the viewers of her documentary.