Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: the damning inventory of the Sauvé commission – archyde

Even more than the absolute, tragic but probably undervalued value, it is the comparison that is devastating. The report of the independent commission on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (Ciase), made public Tuesday, October 5, estimates the number of victims, during their minority, of sexual violence on the part of a priest, a deacon or a religious, in the current population aged 18 and over, to 216,000 people.

The commission chaired by Jean-Marc Sauvé, former vice-president of the Council of State, sought to know where the Catholic Church stood, in this assessment, in relation to other spheres of socialization. His answer is formal: “The Catholic Church is, apart from family and friendly circles, the environment where the prevalence of sexual violence is the highest. “ If we add to this the attacks suffered by non-priests or religious linked to the Church (school staff, catechists, youth movement supervisors, etc.), we arrive at an estimate of 330,000 victims.

The result of two and a half years of work, the report was submitted Tuesday to its representatives, the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF) and the Conference of Religious of France (Corref). Under pressure from the groups of victims, the two organizations, one representing the dioceses and the other the congregations, resolved, in November 2018, to create an independent body to take stock of what happened. since 1950, to study the reactions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to evaluate the measures taken for twenty years to put an end to this phenomenon and to make proposals to prevent its repetition. For several days, messages had been broadcast by certain bishops warning the faithful that they should expect particularly shocking revelations.

Under the title “Sexual violence in the Catholic Church – France, 1950-2020”, the commission, which was able to work without hindrance, made an inventory “Particularly dark”, summarizes Jean-Marc Sauvé in his introduction. For the twenty-two members of the Ciase, the most destabilizing figures arrived in the last phase of their mission. It was in the first half of this year that the general population survey carried out among 30,000 people made it possible to calculate the prevalence of sexual violence according to the different spheres of socialization.

According to this survey, carried out under the supervision of sociologist Nathalie Bajos, research director at Inserm and at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), sexual assaults on minors by clerics and religious represented slightly less than 4% of all assaults of this type committed, which concerned a total of 5.5 million people aged 18 and over today (14.5% of women, 6.4% of men). The proportion rises to 6% if we include attacks committed by lay people linked to the Church.

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