Editorial of the “World”. For a long time, the image of the priest engaging in touching children was a cliché, rumor, between secrecy and fat joke. Since the victims’ words began to be released in the 2010s, in France, as in many other countries, we know that these sexual assaults were numerous, devastating and widely covered by the Catholic hierarchy. But the report of the independent commission on sexual abuse in the Church, made public Tuesday, October 5, gives this violence another dimension: that of a massive scandal involving not only the functioning of the institutions of the first French religion. , but some of its dogmas. Two figures summarize this overwhelming observation: 216,000 people who are adults today have been abused by priests or religious since 1950 when they were minors; some 3,000 clerics behaved like pedophiles.
The balance sheet is all the more explosive since it was drawn up on solid foundations, at the end of a meticulous work of nearly three years combining investigation in the archives, listening to victims, expertise in both canon law and science. social and psycho-psychiatry. Although commissioned and funded by bishops and religious congregations, the report of the commission chaired by Jean-Marc Sauvé, former vice-president of the Council of State, is not suspected of complacency and provides an overview of sexual abuse in the Church of France without equivalent abroad. It establishes that the Catholic Church is, by far, the first place of socialization where, in France, such offenses and crimes have been committed, outside the family.
Make more room for women
The whole question today is to know, beyond the shock of the flood of terrible testimonies on secrets kept for decades and lives marked for ever established principles of concealment and non-denunciation of criminal offenses. The Sauvé commission suggests useful avenues: the Church must recognize its responsibility as an institution, initiate a mechanism of “Financial reparation” and modify its mode of governance, its training and prevention processes. It recommends making criminal justice prevail over canon law, which ignores the victims, to question the“Excessive sacralization of the person of the priest” and make more room for women.
But can such minimal measures be enough for the Church to regain the lost confidence and claim to make her voice heard again in society? The fact that almost all of the sexual abuse observed was committed by men questions the place of women in the institution. He questions the very structures of the Church which, founded on male domination and refusing to allow women to dispense sacraments, doubts a fundamental principle of modern societies: equality between men and women.
Pope Francis, by appointing a few women to positions of responsibility in the Vatican and allowing women to play a role in the liturgical celebration, is leading the way. But it will take much more than this first step towards an aggiornamento for the Church to overcome the trauma of bringing to light this sexual abuse whose character “ massive ‘ and “Systemic “ raises not only the question of the institution’s responsibility towards society, but also those of celibacy that it imposes on priests and the place it reserves for women.