The case has splashed for years the French Catholic Church. Bernard Preynat, 75-year-old former priest from Lyon, appears from Monday January 13 before the Lyon Criminal Court for sexual assaults committed on young scouts between 1971 and 1991, while he was officiating in the parish of Sainte-Foy -lès-Lyon.
Ten victims, minors at the time of the events, took legal action, in addition to a handful of associations. The plaintiffs, scouts aged 7 to 15 at the time, criticized this ex-parish priest for touching, kissing on the mouth and forced reciprocal caresses, particularly on sex.
"He must really say everything he has done"
"This is the opportunity to close a big page in my life, I go there with curiosity, serenity and I especially want to be sure to say everything I have to say at the bar," explains one of the victims, Pierre-Emmanuel Germain-Thill. "He must really say everything he did, not for me, for everyone, even for all those who did not speak," he continues.
Multiple reports from parents, victims and members of the clergy had already led Bernard Preynat to admit his faults before his superiors in 1991, but the Church had contented himself with discreetly moving him away to other parishes in the region. It was not until 2015 that the scandal broke out, when several former scouts resolved to file a complaint. In the process, victims regroup in an association, La parole libéré, to "break the omerta" and place the Catholic hierarchy in front of its responsibilities.
What sentence 30 years later?
Very quickly, the Preynat affair became the Philippe Barbarin scandal. Primate of the Gauls since 2002, the emblematic cardinal is singled out for not having informed justice and kept the priest in office. Tried in 2019, the archbishop was sentenced to six months suspended prison sentence. Back from the diocese, he awaits the decision of the court of appeal scheduled for January 30.
In the Preynat case, the indictment of January 27, 2016 concerns sexual assaults committed on four minors between 1986 and 1991. Other complaints were added, but many facts had to be dismissed because they were time-barred. The investigation revealed that this holder of a cook's CAP, ordained in 1971, had perpetrated his first pedophile assaults at the age of 17, while he was a summer camp instructor in 1962.
Having already confessed to his hierarchy as well as to the investigators, Preynat's conviction is not in doubt, according to his lawyer Frédéric Doyez. "The only question is the sentence that will be imposed, depending on the facts that will be established at trial," he said, describing "a terribly lonely and isolated man who lives on a small pension". The former priest faces 10 years' imprisonment.
On Vatican instructions, the priest was banned from any pastoral ministry after being questioned, but he was able to celebrate masses in private until March 2018. And it was only last summer that an ecclesiastical court brought his first real condemnation by excluding him definitively from the Church.
With AFP
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