Catholic Church “learn” treat “with more rigor and efficiencyaccusations of sexual assault against its members, but rebuilding trust with the faithful will be “long and difficult“, agreed on Wednesday the president of the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF).
“We learn to deal with (these cases) with more rigor and more efficiency. It is a painful, necessary, and perhaps progressive learning“, declared Éric de Moulins-Beaufort at the microphone of RTL.
“We have to move forward”
“We have to move on, that’s for sure.“, added the bishop, who spoke two days after new revelations on facts “reprehensiblecommitted 35 years ago on a 14-year-old girl by Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard.
In that case, “we worked, we did not seek not to say, we worked to make this report possible(of the victim), underlined the president of the CEF. In Lourdes this week, he said he had been made aware of this affair in February, but denied any concealment of the information.
“No one really took victims seriously”
Until 2016,nobody really took the victims seriously: everyone thought ‘they are children, they will forget’. Justice, the police, everyone (was) in this state of mind there“, he said Wednesday.
But “since 2016 we know that the distress of the victims is considerable” and “we understand better and better what is at stake in these casesadded the prelate.