testimonies reveal the scale of a terrifying system

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Ciase) has documented thousands of assaults since its creation on November 7, 2018.

6,500 testimonies of sexual assault. Here is the figure that L'Obs recalls in an article from February 18, 2021. The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Ciase) shows its effectiveness in its work of truth. This independent commission, launched on November 7, 2018, is "responsible for shedding light on the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church since 1950, to understand the reasons which favored the way in which these cases were handled and to make recommendations, in particular by evaluating the measures taken over the years 2000 ", can we read on their site. It is composed of psychiatrists, researchers, theologians, lawyers, doctors, historians, magistrates, of all faiths (or atheists). A necessary mission to allow victims to express themselves and secondly, to break intolerable cogs within the Church. Journalists Matthieu Aron and Céline Rastello thus had access to some of the organization’s hundreds of hours of hearings. And the testimonials show "a systemic character" in assaults.

"I made a social suicide attempt and I was successful."

In 2019, Christian Dubreuil, former chief of staff of several ministers, thus told Ciase, decades later, the actions of a priest from Lyon: “I was 11, then 12… He came on Thursdays, the weekly day off. My parents were traders, they worked downstairs in the store. He put me on his knees in the dining room. first floor…". Anonymously, a member of the commission explained to the newspaper that "Speaking in front of you is like asking me to throw myself from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower." Because in many cases, this is the first time that witnesses speak.

Thanks to hearings, telephone interviews, emails, postal letters, questionnaires, up to 10,000 victims and 3,000 attackers are estimated. A total of around 100,000 priests and religious in France since the 1950s. "My story resurfaced after a stroke which left me hemiplegic, says Jean Humenry, 74 years old. When I came out of the coma, I said to my wife, this is what happened to me when I was little. There I collapsed. There were things coming out, going out, and I was crying, I was crying… Actually, it's like Chernobyl, we put it under a sarcophagus. " These painful memories are accompanied by psychological follow-up. Following this childhood drama, Michelle admits that she has never stopped "fuck (s) for life in the air" after having been abused at 13 by a priest. "I had to rebel. It should have been against my attacker, but I dropped out of school. I attempted social suicide and I was successful."

The "modus operandi" of aggressors in the Church

According to Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of Ciase,"very quickly we realized that we were not confronted with individual abuses of a few priests or religious. (…) The abuses committed in the Church are massive. And they sometimes have a systemic character", he adds. Over the course of the interviews, the Ciase detected a kind of common operating mode, reports L'Obs: "the rapes and abuses were perpetrated within the family, that of the victim, of which the clerics and religious were full members, and that, more extended, of the Church, which has always been customary to present himself thus. " Asked about it, magistrate Antoine Garapon thinks that "The priest, representative of Christ on earth, is adorned with all powers. He has absolute authority unlike any other, and nothing seems to be forbidden to him."

La Ciase launched an online survey with Inserm, among 30,000 people, to highlight the sexual crimes committed "in French society as a whole and have quantitative data on their relative share, within the Catholic Church, compared to other institutions and to the family environment". Another study will be carried out, based on interviews and the analysis of documentary collections, on priests who perpetrate sexual assault in order to better understand their journey, as well as "the determinants of their actions". The delivery of the public report is scheduled for early fall 2021. Likewise, the commission will make recommendations to the Church to take into account the victims' right to claim reparation.