The former priest Bernard Preynat, tried in Lyon for multiple sexual assaults on young scouts over 30 years ago, pointed to the responsibility of his hierarchy on Wednesday 15 January. He said that he had alerted him several times to his impulses, but this did not require him to seek treatment.
"Already at 14, at the minor seminary, I already knew [that I was attracted to little boys]. I was told 'you are a sick person', but they got rid of me. They told me sent to another seminar, "says Bernard Preynat at the helm for this second day of a trial after which he faces up to ten years in prison.
The former parish priest of Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, in the Lyon suburbs, explains that his inclinations did not prevent his ordination in 1971. "They should have helped me ... They let me become a priest" , he explained, while undergoing therapy at the Vinatier psychiatric hospital near Lyon in 1967 and 1968.
Absolution after confessions
Over the years, he explained during confession that he had presented some of his actions and impulses "as a sin". But "the priest gave me encouragement so that I did not start again, and absolution". "I have been told several times of illness without giving myself a way out of it", he summarizes, while taking care to temper: "I do not accuse the Church; I do not use it as an excuse. "
After his indictment in 2016, he says he did not "have the idea (s) 'to engage again in therapy". He claims to have stopped his abuses in the early 1990s, by his simple will, after a promise made to Cardinal Albert Decourtray.
"He touched me like a savage"
Ten civil parties, out of 35 victims heard during the investigation, were constituted at the trial, many facts being in particular time-barred. On this second day of trial in Lyon, there were also new victims who spoke of serious trauma.
"He talks about caresses. My wife caresses me. He was masturbation; he touched me like a savage", indignant Stéphane Hoarau, 8 years old at the time of the events.
"He lowered my shorts, touched my sex, masturbated me, forced me to masturbate and sometimes asked me to masturbate, to stroke his cock ... He turned me over to rub against me," explained at the stand the victim.
According to Stéphane Hoarau, the young prey of Bernard Preynat sometimes succeeded in the same room. Called by the priest under the pretext of helping him with something (a frequent operating mode at his place), Stéphane Hoarau remembers having met when arriving a little boy, fleeing glance, head down, which left a room where was the priest. "I really had the impression that he had subjected her to the same thing," he testified.
"I was confident." In the beginning. But "I was not born under a lucky star", underlines Stéphane Hoarau, placed at the age of 4 in foster care after having already been the victim of a sexual predator in his family circle. He had been registered by his host family with the scouts of Bernard Preynat's group to "crop it". What he harvests are touching, repeated sexual assaults. He will file a complaint in April 2016 after long years of silence.
After the scouts will follow other galleys, host families, home, home for young workers and "homelessness" at barely 18 years old.
"Visions come back to me"
Another victim witnesses horrible "flashes" when she changes the diapers of her twins, two-year-old boys.
"Sometimes when I have to change them, visions come back to me. Fears come back to me," says the strangled voice, Stéphane Sylvestre, who filed a complaint in 2015. "While changing a child is very far from caresses sur le sexe "by Bernard Preynat. But "I was afraid of becoming an attacker myself".
Faced with his victims, Bernard Preynat, as since the beginning of his trial, partially recognizes the facts and asks for their forgiveness. "I regret having made him unhappy," said the 74-year-old priest after the poignant testimony of Stéphane Sylvestre.
The president, Anne-Sophie Martinet, indicated that the experts who tried to probe the personality of Bernard Preynat, an adulated priest and sexual pervert would be heard in the afternoon.
The assaults of the ex-parish priest, expelled from the Church at the end of his canonical trial last summer, are at the origin of the condemnation of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, in March 2019, to six months in prison suspended his silences around the acts of Bernard Preynat.
With AFP
Newsletter Don't miss anything from international news
Don't miss anything from international newssubscribe
google-play-badge_FR