by Arthur McCaffrey

October 5th 2021 will be remembered as a ‘day of infamy’ for both the French Catholic Church and the global Church. That’s the date of publication of a damning report indicting the French Catholic Church as the source for hundreds of thousands of child abuse victims over a 70 year period from 1950 to 2020.

The report is Commission indépendante sur les abus sexuels dans l’Eglise (CIASE), at ciase.fr. There is also an English summary available, titled Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church France 1950 – 2020: Summary of the Final Report/ Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE), and the reference to that can also be found on the ciase.fr page, under ‘Rapport Final’. The Independent Commission was set up by the National Bishops’ Conference of France in late 2018 under the complete autonomy of its Director, Jean-Marc Sauvé, who selected 21 commission members to begin collecting evidence from victims in early 2019, ending and publishing the results of their inquiry on October 5, 2021.

CIASE’s initial brief had two main objectives: shed light on the sexual violence committed since 1950, and examine the extent to which these cases were, or were not, dealt with by the French Church.

Harrowing Testimony

Much of the Inquiry was driven by testimony from thousands of victim/ survivors who were credited for their active role in establishing the truth. And that truth, uncovered after painful and harrowing testimony, helped the Commission confront issues of culpability, reparation, and reconciliation.

The results are simply astounding: ‘At the end of its work, the Commission drew up an inventory of sexual violence in the Church, which makes for particularly grim reading…… the number of child victims who suffered at the hands of clergy, monks or nuns is, in effect, estimated to be about 216,000. While, in absolute and relative terms, these acts of violence were in decline up until the early 1990s, they have since stopped decreasing. The Catholic Church is the place where the prevalence of sexual violence is at its highest, other than in family and friend circles. Faced with this scourge, for a very long time the Catholic Church’s immediate reaction was to protect itself as an institution and it has shown complete, even cruel, indifference to those having suffered abuse.’

When they added cases of abuse committed by other Church personnel, the Commission estimates rose to over 300,000 children – which averages out to over 80 abused children per week over a 70-year period – for recorded cases only!

As for the French Church, the report states: ‘It is vital to really deliver justice to the men and women who have suffered, in body and soul, from sexual violence in the Catholic Church. Consequently, everything must be done to repair, in so far as is possible, the harm which has been done to them and to help them rebuild their lives. And to eradicate the breeding ground of abuse and the impunity of the perpetrators of these crimes. Such a step forward cannot bypass the need for a humble acknowledgement of responsibility from the Church authorities for the mistakes and crimes committed under its auspices. This will involve taking a path of contrition – on a level with the scale of suffering – which cannot be conceived and covered in a matter of days or weeks.’

Did everyone get the Commission’s message that the French Church had committed ‘crimes’? Apparently not. The day after the publication of the CIASE report, Reuters reported that the Archbishop of Reims and head of the Bishops’ Conference of France told a radio interview that the secrecy of the confession rite takes precedence over the laws of the French republic. The latter are quite clear that anyone who is aware of a sex crime against a minor is obliged to report it to the authorities and risks heavy fines and imprisonment if failing to do so. Thankfully the Bishop was immediately summoned by President Macron and France’s Interior Minister to appear for a lesson in priorities.

Northern Ireland

As if the French news was not bad enough, a few hundred miles away in Northern Ireland another day of infamy was also breaking on October 5th, where an Independent Commission released its Final Report on abuses of mothers and infants in institutions run by Catholic and Protestant agencies. Commissioned by the NI  government, the report is: ‘Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses in Northern Ireland: Truth, Acknowledgement and Accountability.’ 

The NI inquiry called itself the ‘Truth Recovery Design Panel (TCDP),’ and its work was largely driven by victimsurvivor testimony (as in CIASE), which played a significant role in helping construct a database of cases which will be used to form another NI Independent Government Investigation aimed at establishing culpability and providing redress and reparation for victims. The TCDP findings are almost as shocking as the French cases: between 1922 and 1990, more than 14,000 unmarried girls and women went through the doors of mother and baby homes, sent there by their families or church leaders under a shadow of stigma, secrecy and shame, believing they had no other choice due to being pregnant out of wedlock.

Women were mistreated, abused physically and psychologically, held against their will, and forced to give up children for adoption. Many of the infants and children who died were buried in unmarked mass graves. One TCDP panel member said the research contained ‘clear evidence of gross and systemic human rights abuses in the institutions and related adoption system’. The Vatican reaction to the French bombshell of October 5th stated that the Pope ‘learned with sorrow’ about the content of the investigation into sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church: ‘First of all, his thoughts go to the victims, with great sorrow, for their wounds,’ adding that the Pope also felt gratitude for the courage they had shown in denouncing what they had been through… (His thoughts go to) the Church of France, so that, in the awareness of this terrible reality ... it may embark on a path of redemption.’

Institutional failure

The CIASE report reads like a battlefront dispatch from a long-running war on children. But so far, only one brave German Cardinal has been willing to stand up and be counted as a conscientious objector to this carnage - Reinhard Marx of Munich offered to resign in June 2021 as a gesture of respect for victims and in recognition of the seriousness of the crisis - he felt he needed to share ‘the responsibility for the catastrophe of the sexual abuse by church officials over the past decades.’ Cardinal Marx was head of the German Bishops’ Conference which issued a report in 2018 documenting the sexual abuse of almost 3,700 children in Germany over seven decades. Marx offered his resignation over the church’s ‘institutional and systemic failure’ in its handling of clerical sex abuse. He was trying to lead by example and hoped his resignation could send a personal signal ‘for a new beginning, for a new awakening of the church, not only in Germany. I would like to show that it is not the institution that stands in the foreground, but the mission of the Gospel’.