The Fund for the relief and fight against abuse of minors in the Catholic Church (Selam) has paid six financial reparations to victims of pedocrime, its president told AFP on Sunday. “We had a board of directors which followed and decided for (…) six situations that the Inirr had transmitted“, he said, confirming information from the JDD.
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The Selam, created in 2021 by the episcopate, is the structure that pays any financial reparations studied initially by another organization, the Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation (Inirr). On June 1, the president of Inirr, Marie Derain de Vaucresson, had told the press that 736 people who had been victims of priests or lay people in various Church places (excluding congregations) had contacted this organization since mid- January, date of collection of the first files. She had specified that the Inirr would have, in June, ruled on 10 files, before transmission to Selam. She had mentioned amounts of 8,000, 10,000 or 21,000 euros. Mr. Vermot-Desroches did not give the amounts of the first six installments.
For victims wishing financial compensation, the Inirr has set up a system comprising a “gradation scaleaccording to three axes (seriousness of the facts, seriousness of thefailings of the Church», seriousness of the consequences), each ranging from 1 to 10. The remedy does not include a threshold «floor“, but can go as far as “maximum amount” of “€60,000“. As of June 1, several groups of victims had regretted the slowness at which, according to them, the files are advancing, considering too few people compensated, six months after the filing of the first requests. “The implementation process may seem long for people who have been waiting for a long time“, said Sunday Mr. Vermot-Desroches, stressing that “approximately six months after the conclusions of the Sauvé report, which revealed the extent of the phenomenon of pedocrime, the first payments were made“.
The Selam further decided to “fully finance» the first year of a university degree (DU) set up at the start of the school year by the Catholic Institute of Paris to better train people from the Church in the prevention and fight against abuse. The president of Selam had affirmed in January to have collected for his fund 20 million euros: it is about “13 million euros in effective donations (essentially contributions from dioceses and bishops) and seven million pledges“, he said on Sunday