The young man had been listening politely from the start. Sitting in this 1er December in a room, rue de Vaugirard in Paris, where the Recognition and Reparation Commission for victims of sexual violence committed by members of religious institutes presents the results of its first year of activity, he stands up when questions are asked. Anger contained in the look. Why, he asks, was his attacker not returned to the secular state?
The same haunting question comes up when a nun, also a victim, points out that she has left her congregation when the priest she accuses is still there. Opposite, the heads of the commission listen but cannot respond. The delicate problem is not in their hands, but in those of those who pronounce the penalty within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Because the Church has its own internal legislation, called canon law, which has authority there to regulate the lives of its members and to judge them if they infringe it. It is its courts which, in parallel or even in addition of civil justice, decide on the measures taken for each crime, according to a principle of just punishment, individualized and adapted to each situation and each case. However, for some time now, many have been accusing them, as these victims did on this December day, of a weakness in the sentences imposed.
“Lives prevented”
On Tuesday, January 17, the publication of the measures taken against Tony Anatrella, a priest and media psychotherapist known for his condemnation of homosexuality, put this question back on the agenda. Accused by patients of sexual assault, the therapist, whose case has been running for almost two decades, was doubly “condemned” by the Vatican and the diocese of Paris at the end of a canonical procedure started in 2016, after the French justice, she closed the case without further action for prescription of the facts.
The first has “enjoins the person concerned to renounce immediately and without delay any professional activity as a therapist”. The second added his own sanctions, asking him “formally” to no longer practice psychotherapy, to no longer publish books or participate in conferences, to no longer celebrate mass in public or to no longer confess the faithful. He is also asked to go and practice a “life of prayers in a more remote daily life”. On social networks, however, there is indignation at the reading of the pithy press release from the diocese of Paris. Internet users are once again wondering: why is Tony Anatrella not returned to the lay state?
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