VFriday March 31, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the Conference of Bishops of France, declared, in his closing speech of the spring assembly, that he wanted the Church “be freed from the weight of violence and sexual assault”. But do the bishops really give themselves all the means? One can ask the question, in view of what was retained by their plenary assembly of the sixty proposals formulated by nine working groups (WG).
The constitution of these groups – strictly equal, mostly composed of lay people and with among them victims – was one of the resolutions adopted by the episcopate after the handover [en 2021] of the report of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (Ciase), led by Jean-Marc Sauvé.
In the immediate wake of the recommendations made by Ciase, it was a question of formulating “concrete proposals” on the ” good practices “ to be observed in the cases reported, on the follow-up of priests who are perpetrators of violence, confession, the accompaniment of priests and that of bishops, on the training of seminarians, the ways of associating lay people with the work of the Episcopal Conference or even on the “vigilance” to be required in relation to the new communities. As an expert, I walked for a year with those of GT8, which devoted itself, in a more transversal way, to“analysis of the causes of sexual violence in the Church”. I observed their commitment and their hope to change things. Today I witness their sadness and, for some, their anger.
Call for self-discipline
One of the effects of the outbreak of the scandal of sexual violence in the Catholic Church, particularly at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, is to have reactivated an intra-ecclesial debate, sluggish for several decades in France, stifled or pushed back to its margins. These working groups were a good example of this. By relying on academic knowledge (of the social sciences, psychiatry and theology) and on knowledge based on experience, giving full consideration to the voices of victims, the members of GT8 have seized subjects such as the exercise of power, relations between clerics and lay people (women in particular) or even sexual morality. The freedom of speech and the horizontality of the exchanges, without unnecessary deference towards the bishop present in the group, placed on an equal footing including in theological matters, were remarkable.
You have 58.47% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.