It is a long-term story, spanning three quarters of a century and whose repercussions we still deplore today. That of a family first, the brothers Philippe, Thomas and Marie-Dominique, revered religious and sometimes considered as saints by those who attended them and yet recognized by the Church as perpetrators of a series of sexual assaults unheard of. Then that of a religious community, the Brothers of Saint-Jean, founded in 1975 by Marie-Dominique Philippe and also affected by violence since its creation and until today.
Of the actions of the first two on nuns, religious but also lay people, the public now knows a number of facts thanks to the two reports published in January, including that of the Dominicans, the order to which the brothers belonged. But also that of l’Arche, a community of associations for the disabled, whose founder Jean Vanier, disciple of the two brothers, also committed violence. These texts have come to enrich the knowledge of the community of the faithful on congregations whose abuses have been publicized and listed by the press since the beginning of the 2000s.
Today, it is the Brothers of Saint-Jean who themselves are looking into their own history – with all the limits that an internal exercise may present – through an 800-page report made public on Monday June 26 in the evening, written by members of the community as well as historians and theologians. A third volume that sheds harsh light on the actions of the members of this order for nearly fifty years. The result is an edifying and potentially undervalued assessment – not all the victims come forward – of violence qualified as “systemic” by the authors of the report. Of the 871 brothers, including 390 priests, who have attended the community since its creation in 1975 and up to the present day, the authors identify 72 who have committed sexual violence. Priests alone have committed 52. The victims are both adults and minors. The largest contingent being represented by lay women and nuns.
“Not peripheral phenomena”
Reading the report, we understand that this series of violence that runs over several decades can in no way be considered as the act of bad apples, independent of the spiritual rules of the community and the teaching received within it. On the contrary. “The sexual abuse committed in the Saint-Jean family cannot be understood in all its dimensions if we consider them as isolated acts, unrelated to each other, because they are partly linked to group dysfunctions. These are not peripheral phenomena occurring in an organism that would have been healthy in itself, but they are linked to a system over which Father M.-D. Philip is the center”, acknowledge the authors. A grip, they continue, “which has turned in some people into an abdication of conscience, even into a form of idolatry”.
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