Abuse in the Church of France: 330,000 children were victims between 1950 and 2020 | They presented the results of the report of the Independent Commission

At least 330,000 people were victims of sexual abuse in their childhood within the Catholic Church in France from 1950 to 2020, according to a report presented Tuesday by Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (Ciase), who stressed that these acts are not just a thing of the past: “Sexual violence in the church has not been eradicated”.

Through interviews with victims and an analysis of ecclesiastical archives, the Ciase was able to determine that 216,000 children were abused by priests and religious, while the remaining number corresponds to cases in which the authors were lay people who worked in religious institutions.

Victims of abuse in France

The victimsadded the president of Ciase, 80 percent were boys aged 10 to 13, while religious abusers are around 2.8%, a lower percentage than in other countries that have investigated these events: in Germany the average is 4.4% and in the United States it rises to 7%.

According to the report, 56% of identified cases occurred between 1950 and 1969 and 22% in the 70s, 80s and 90s have stopped so far this century. For Sauvé, the figure is falling due to a lower attendance of the French in Catholic neighborhoods and not to the actions of the church, which only after the appearance of media scandals began to take measures to fight against pedophilia.

The neglect of the Church of France

Sauvé accuses the ecclesiastical institution of “negligence” for not taking warning signs or complaints from victims seriously and to have tried to hide religious pedophiles.

The chairman of the commission said that abuse is a “massive” phenomenon, although he acknowledged that both the victims and the identified aggressors are “a minimum”. Sauvé argued that the Church must “ask forgiveness” and compensate those who have been victims of these abuses and, for the most part, they carry “significant” problems of sexual and psychological behavior.

Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the French Episcopal Conference, regretted that the outlook was bleak and “much higher than expected”, but avoided raising the possibility of compensating the victims.

“You have to pay for all these crimes”

“You have to pay for all these crimes”, accused François Devaux in front of a handful of bishops and the papal nuncio in France and accused the institution of taking shelter in “a fetid strategy” to avoid compensating the victims.

Devaux was the victim of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin – who had been sentenced at first instance to six months in prison in 2019, but was later acquitted – and founded the organization La Parole libérée, which brings together other people mistreated by religious French.

The commission’s report also recommends reviewing the secrecy of confession so that it cannot be applied in cases of commission of crimes, to introduce lay people into the governing bodies of the church to prevent clerics from accumulating everything. power, to adapt the training of priests or to review sexual morals, now considered a taboo within the institution.