Editorials

The Irish Times view on clerical abuse: France’s reckoning

A landmark report lays out how the Catholic hierarchy repeatedly silenced victims and failed to report or discipline clergy involved

Francois Devaux, founder of victim association “La parole libérée”, speaks during the publishing of a report by an independant commission into sexual abuse by church officials on Tuesday in Paris. The report found that an estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years. Photograph: Thomas Coex/ pool via AP
Francois Devaux, founder of victim association “La parole libérée”, speaks during the publishing of a report by an independant commission into sexual abuse by church officials on Tuesday in Paris. The report found that an estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years. Photograph: Thomas Coex/ pool via AP
Tue Oct 05 2021 - 18:45

The language of France's report into the wholesale sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church is shockingly familiar. Ireland too has told that story of brutal, repeated abuse – covered up, as the report says, in a "systemic way" by a deliberate, institutional "veil of silence". It has also been catalogued in similar excruciating, painful detail in Australia, Germany, Poland, the United States and elsewhere.

France’s reckoning with the truth comes in a searing 2,500-page report from the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church, commissioned by the church in 2018 in the wake of a series of scandals. It lays out in detail how the hierarchy repeatedly silenced victims and failed to report or discipline clergy involved. Some 216,000 minors have been abused by clergy since 1950, a figure that the report says reached 330,000 when perpetrators who worked for the church or were affiliated with it as laypersons, such as Boy Scout organisers or Catholic school staff, were included.

The commission, which heard evidence from 6,500 victims and witnesses close to them, estimates that there had been at least 2,900 perpetrators of sexual abuse among clergy members over the past 70 years.

“The church failed to see or hear, failed to pick up on the weak signals, failed to take the rigorous measures that were necessary,” Jean-Marc Sauvé, the commission president, told a news conference in Paris on Tuesday. For years, the church showed a “deep, total and even cruel indifference toward victims” that was “systemic”.

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The challenge for the French Church now will be to go beyond the abject mea culpas of the last two days. Compensation, recommended by the commission, must be forthcoming from the Church for all identifiable victims, whether or not the statute of limitations on specific offences has run out. And, internally, the Church must institute rigorous vetting of those who work or associate with children, priests must undergo child protection training, while mandatory reporting is vital whether or not it conforms with canon law.