The French Church recognizes her "blindness and deafness" to pedophilia and announces aid for the victims

The Episcopal Conference of France (CEF) has lamented this Friday the collective "blindness and deafness" to pedophilia in its bosom and has publicly recognized its "past, present and future responsibility" for the abuse of minors within the Catholic Church national, which according to an independent commission could have caused more than 10,000 victims.

The top French religious leaders have promised to amend themselves with a series of measures that include financial aid for the “accompaniment” of the victims and a national day in their memory, as well as the creation of a national canonical criminal court.

The Church "wants to assume its responsibility before society and ask for forgiveness for those crimes and for those failures," said the heads of the French Episcopal Conference at the end of a plenary assembly in Lourdes.

Pedophilia occupied a good part of the spring meeting of the bishops, aware that the report that the independent commission created two years ago will present at the end of the summer threatens to cause an earthquake in a society that is increasingly intransigent with the sexual abuse of minors.

The bishops' conclusions are devastating.

“The ecclesiastical authorities did not know how to see or hear and sometimes they did not want to see or hear (…).

We recognize this blindness and deafness of the bishops and other ecclesiastical leaders ”, says the first and main of the 11 resolutions adopted, which revolves around the responsibility of the Church.

“We recognize that they failed to report, that they evaded justice, in the face of facts of which they had knowledge and that there was a lack of rigor in the management of files by some of those responsible.

For example, in the appointment of priests, they underestimated the danger of recidivism and there was a serious lack of vigilance, "summarizes the text, which highlights the" moral duty to recognize the situation and use all possible means to make the truth known. " .

For this, the bishops have presented this Friday a series of measures, which they will implement progressively until 2022.

With regard to the victims, the French Church will offer them a “financial aid” based on the needs of each one of them to help them overcome the abuses.

The fund will initially be endowed with five million euros and will be awarded by an independent commission starting next year.

Faced with past and present criticisms that the Church tries to keep its back against possible lawsuits, Moulins-Beaufort stressed that "it is neither compensation nor reparation."

They will also create a "national listening team" of victims.

In a more symbolic way, they have decided to "consecrate a day of memory and prayer for the victims", which has been set for the third Friday of Lent - next year will be March 12 - and a "memorial" will be created that will serve both to “keep alive the memory of the events and the way in which the assaulted people lived through this trial”, but also a “pedagogical place to train future generations in the vigilance on possible drifts of spiritual power”.

The initial idea is, if "possible", to erect this memorial in Lourdes.

Improve training

In terms of prevention and response to abuses, the Church is also committed to improving internal training, both to detect and listen to possible victims and to prevent new abuses, as well as to act against religious pedophiles.

In this sense, the bishops have decided to create an “interdiocesan canonical criminal court”.

The objective is "to have the necessary means to act with the diligence that has often been lacking in these cases," explained the vice-president of the organ, Olivier Lebornge.

Finally, the bishops are preparing to send until the summer a "letter to the Catholics of France" in which they recognize "directly" the "mistakes and errors committed" and "call for vigilance, financial aid to the victims and the prayer".

"We have discovered that our Church carried evil in what could seem to be its most positive activity, its educational work, its service in favor of the spiritual growth of children and young people," said Moulins-Beaufort at the close of the meeting.

The public testimonies of the victims, he added, “have made us realize that those dramas were not isolated cases that can be attributed to fatalities in history, if that were a sustainable Christian reasoning, but that they were much more destructive than usual. that we believed or wanted to believe ”.

At the end of 2018, and harassed by the cases of religious about to be tried for pedophilia or for failing to report abuses of which they were aware - such as the once all-powerful Archbishop of Lyon, Philippe Barbarin - the French Episcopal Conference agreed to create a body independent investigation that investigated possible cases of pedophilia since 1950 and “the reasons that favored the way in which these matters were treated”, so that they do not happen again. The result was the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), a body made up of two dozen experts —theologians, jurists, sociologists or psychologists— that for a little over a year has collected testimonies from victims. According to its president, Jean-Marc Sauvé, at the beginning of the month, 3,000 victims have been confirmed, but “it is very possible that there will be at least 10,000”.