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The 120 or so Catholic Bishops of France meet in plenary session this Tuesday, November 5 in Lourdes. The question of a financial allocation to victims of pedophilia in the Church should be raised.
If it already exists in the United States, Belgium or Switzerland, the mechanism of an allowance for victims of pedocriminality in the Church is unpublished in France. For the Bishops' Conference of France, it is a " gesture of recognition of trauma experienced ".
May benefit any person recognized as a victim by the French courts, those who have conducted legal proceedings. But also the victims of already prescribed facts. They will then have to manifest themselves to the listening cells set up in the dioceses.
► To read also: With the Barbarin trial, the hierarchy of the Church facing justice
Recognition of prescribed facts is a very strong expectation of victims' associations, because pedophilia within the Church remains taboo. Many victims struggle to denounce their aggressors, who embody religion, a certain authority and trust. Speech is sometimes released in adulthood, too late in the eyes of justice.
The Conference of Bishops of France does not want to talk about compensation. Instead, she is thinking about a package whose amount remains to be defined. This will be part of the discussions in the coming days.
A new step in the fight against pedophilia in the Church
After the outbreak of scandals in recent years, the Church of France has been forced to react and launch concrete actions. At the autumn plenary session of 2018, still in Lourdes, the prelates had voted to create an independent Commission on Sexual Crimes in the Church (CIASE), to shed light on those committed by religious since the end of the 1950s. It is chaired by Jean-Marc Sauvé, a former vice-president of the Conseil d'État.
► See also: Pedophilia in the Church: an independent commission created
The testimonies poured in very quickly. In just three months, the CIASE has received 2,500 phone calls, e-mails and letters, and could eventually receive twice as many. It is to report back in 2021, both on how the sexual abuse cases have been handled by the Church for more than half a century, and on the assessment of measures taken since the 2000s.
The liberated, skeptical Word
The association The liberated Word wonders about the financing of the system of allowances envisaged. The episcopate has an internal fund of 5 million euros, which covers the work of the independent commission. The Church also plans to set up an external endowment fund, fueled by a call for donations. But do the faithful have to pay for the crimes and offenses of religious?
The association of victims, created in 2015 to denounce the actions of Father Preynat and the silence of Cardinal Barbarin, remains very skeptical about the project of the Conference of Bishops of France. For its president François Devaux, compensation for victims is necessary, but he wonders what is the true motivation of the French Church. " We know that by 2021, a report will be published by the Sauvé commission and that this report will be catastrophic for the Church," explains François Devaux. The whole strategy and the game (of the Church) will be to reduce this impact as much as possible both financially and morally. How deep is this approach? ".
The association regrets the lack of space for victims of pedophilia in the reflection of the Church. Last year, for the first time, some of them had been heard by bishops in Lourdes, but not in plenary. For this reason, the liberated Word had refused to go to the Marian city.
The allocation mechanism will be discussed from Tuesday in Lourdes, and voted by Saturday. The bishops will then have to look at three other projects: the memory work with the victims, the prevention of pedophile acts and finally the follow-up of the guilty priests.