A report issued Thursday, said an estimated 330,000 children have been victims of sex abuse within the Catholic Church in France over the past 70 years. This is France’s first big reckoning with the tragic phenomenon.
According to Jean-Marc Sauvé, the president of the panel that produced the report, the amount covers crimes committed by about 3,000 priests and other church personnel, misbehavior that Catholic authorities hushed up in a “systematic” manner over decades.
The leader of the French bishops’ conference pleaded with the victims for forgiveness. On Tuesday, the committee will meet to consider the next steps.
The commission asked the church to take firm action, citing “faults” and “silence” as examples. It also urged the French government to assist in the compensation of victims, particularly in situations that are too old to be prosecuted through the courts.
Boys made up almost 80% of the victims.
“The ramifications are dire,” Sauvé added. “About 60% of men and women who have been sexually assaulted have significant emotional or sexual problems.”
The 2,500-page report, compiled by an independent panel, comes as the Catholic Church in France, like in other countries, struggles to confront long-hidden scandals.
The study was greeted by victims as long overdue.
The high ratio of victims per abuser is particularly “terrifying for French society, for the Catholic Church,” according to Olivier Savignac, president of victims organization “Parler et Revivre,” which participated in the investigation.
He chastised the church for considering such tragedies as isolated incidents rather than a collective horror. He claimed he was assaulted by the director of a Catholic summer camp in the south of France when he was 13 years old, and that he was also accused of abusing many other boys.
“I saw this priest as a kind person who cared about me and would not harm me,” Savignac claimed. “But it wasn’t until I was half-naked on that bed and he was groping me that I understood something wasn’t right….” And we keep this, and it’s like a growing cyst, like gangrene inside the victim’s body and mind.”
Starting in the 1950s, the panel worked for two and a half years, listening to victims and witnesses and researching church, court, police, and press records. A hotline set up at the start of the investigation got 6,500 calls from alleged victims or persons who claimed to know someone who was a victim.
Until the early 2000s, Sauvé described the church’s attitude as “a deep, terrible indifference for victims.”
According to the findings, 3,000 child abusers worked in the church throughout that time, with two-thirds of them being priests. According to Sauvé, the total number of victims includes an estimated 216,000 people who have been molested by priests and other clerics.
“At times, church leaders did not denounce (sex assaults) and even put children in danger by exposing them to predators,” Sauvé said. “We believe that the church owes victims a debt.”
Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, President of the French Bishops’ Conference, stated Tuesday that the report’s results “appalled” him.
He told the victims, “On that day, I desire to ask for mercy, pardon to each of you.”
Prosecutors have been notified of 22 suspected offenses that can still be pursued, according to Sauvé. More than 40 cases have been referred to church officials that are too old to be prosecuted but involve accused abusers who are still alive.
The commission made 45 recommendations for preventing child abuse. Training priests and other clergies, amending Canon Law — the legal law by which the Vatican governs the church — and creating procedures to acknowledge and recompense victims were among them, according to Sauvé.
The claim comes after the French Catholic Church was rocked by the scandal surrounding now-defrocked priest Bernard Preynat. Preynat was sentenced to five years in prison last year after being found guilty of sexually abusing youngsters. For decades, he admitted to abusing more than 75 youngsters.
“With this research, the French church for the first time is going to the bottom of this systemic problem,” Francois Devaux, chairman of the victims’ group La Parole Libérée (“The Liberated Word”), told reporters. The deviant institution needs to change.”
According to him, the number of victims identified in the report is “a minimum.”
“Some victims were afraid to speak out or put their faith in the commission,” he said.
The former archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, resigned last year as a result of the Preynat case after he was accused of failing to disclose the acts to civil authorities when he knew of them in the 2010s. Barbarin did not cover up the case, according to a ruling by France’s top court earlier this year.
In a message to parishioners read during Sunday Mass across France, archbishops said the report’s release is “a test of truth and a difficult and serious occasion.”
The statement stated, “We will receive and evaluate these results in order to alter our actions.” “We are all concerned about the fight against pedophilia… Our prayers and assistance will continue to be directed toward all those who have been mistreated in the church.”
Pope Francis released historic new church legislation in May 2019 that requires all Catholic priests and nuns worldwide to disclose priestly sexual abuse and cover-ups to church authorities.
In June, Francis turned down an offer to resign as archbishop of Munich and Freising from Cardinal Reinhard Marx, one of Germany’s most famous clerics and a key papal adviser, over the church’s treatment of abuse cases. However, he stated that reform was required and that each bishop must bear responsibility for the situation’s “catastrophe.”
