LISBON, Portugal—A lay committee looking into historic child sex abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church said Thursday that during its first month of work it received allegations from 214 people. The allegations are from people born between 1933 and 2006 and tell of psychological torment kept secret for decades, the Independent Committee for the Study of Child Abuse in the Church said. “This suffering is associated with feelings of shame, fear, guilt, and self-exclusion, reinforcing the idea of lives where the sensation of ‘standing on the sidelines’ was always present,” the committee said in a statement. Portuguese church officials said two years ago that authorities had investigated only about a dozen allegations of sexual abuse involving Portuguese priests since 2001. More than half of those cases were dropped because church investigators decided there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue them. The six-person committee, which includes psychiatrists, a former Supreme Court judge, …