The French Church has finally decided to face its responsibility in the decades of sexual abuse of minors at the hands of religious and lay personnel within the institution. After a week of meetings in Lourdes, the epicenter of French Catholicism, the Episcopal Conference agreed on Monday to sell part of its patrimony to repair and compensate the victims, even if the crimes have prescribed.
The decision is the response to the report that the French Church itself commissioned from a team led by senior official Jean-Marc Sauvé and that, after two and a half years of investigations, was published in early October. The French bishops react after decades of closing their eyes to crimes, and years of resisting admitting responsibility and taking drastic measures.
“We understood that we had to go to the end in the work on the truth that we had started,” said in a public statement the president of the Episcopal Conference, Éric de Moulins-Beaufort. “An evil was committed, a lot of evil was committed, and it must be assumed.”
The Sauvé report concluded that, between 1950 and 2020, a minimum of 216,000 people, mostly men, had been victims of sexual assaults committed by priests, deacons, men and women religious while they were minors. The figure rose to 330,000 if lay personnel are counted as teachers in Catholic schools or monitors of boy scouts.
The report cited, among the countries where in the last 15 years the Church faced clergy sexual violence against minors, the United States, Chile, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. In Spain, bishops and most religious orders have resisted investigating abuses and have opted for opacity.
The French report, which included 45 recommendations, has had the effect of an electroshock among French Catholics and in the hierarchy. The Plenary Assembly of Bishops in Lourdes – a small town in southern France to which believers attribute a history of apparitions and miracles – addressed the essential point and one of the most complex to put into practice: compensation for victims of massive abuses that, for the most part, have prescribed or in which the aggressors have died. And, in an early decision on Friday, he unequivocally acknowledged the collective role of the institution beyond the individual blame of the attackers.
“A historical stage has been crossed, it must be recognized,” he said on Friday, in statements collected by the newspaper. Liberation, François Devaux, founder of one of the victims’ associations that has contributed in recent years to the Church assuming its responsibility. “It is the beginning of a long road, but everything is not resolved, especially when it comes to restoring confidence.”
In the past two decades, two bishops, those of Bayeux and Orleans, have been convicted of cover-up. Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, former archbishop of Lyon, was acquitted in 2020 after being convicted in the first instance for failing to report abuses committed by a priest in his diocese. The case, recounted in the film Thanks god by François Ozon, was decisive in making many of the faithful and society as a whole aware of the problem and promoting the changes that are now beginning to take place.
The bishops, says the Lourdes document, “have verified that they agreed to recognize the institutional responsibility of the Church in the violence that so many victims have suffered” and “to recognize the systemic dimension of this violence.” At this point, the hierarchs emphasize that the actions of isolated individuals cannot be explained without a context in which “the operations, mentalities and practices in the Catholic Church have allowed these acts to be perpetuated and have prevented them from being denounced and punished. ”.
The bishops add that “recognizing this responsibility implies a duty of justice and reparation that opens up the possibility of truly asking for forgiveness.” To do this, it undertakes a series of measures, of which two stand out. The first is the creation of an independent institution that, under the presidency of the jurist Marie Derain de Vaucresson, will attend and study the demands of the victims.
The second measure is the fund to compensate them. The use of donations from the faithful is excluded, according to Bishop Moulins-Beaufort. The money must come from the sale of real estate and personal property of the Episcopal Conference of their dioceses, although these are limited, since the ecclesiastical buildings prior to 1905 – year of approval of the law of separation of the State and the churches – are property of the State. The statement mentions another way of financing: indebtedness.
The bishops created last March a fund with an initial endowment of five million euros, insufficient to meet the compensation. The Sauvé report He suggested that the money also come from the assets of the aggressors. It also recommended that compensation be calculated not globally or with scales for different categories of victims – if this were possible – but on a case-by-case and individual basis.
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