Jean-Marc Sauvé: the report on child crime in the Church “is a shock, a kind of earthquake”

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France 24 receives Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, which delivered its report this week, after two and a half years of investigation, revealing that 216,000 children have been sexually abused by priests, men and women religious since the 1950s. For Jean-Marc Sauvé, the Church was not “able to see or hear”. He considers “essential and inevitable” that it recognizes its systemic responsibility.

Jean-Marc Sauvé underlines that in addition to the revelations on abuse within the Church, the report highlights the phenomenon of sexual abuse in general, which according to him affects 10% of the adult population in France. A figure also put forward on France 24 this week by the children’s judge Édouard Durand, co-president of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence against Children (CIIVISE)

Jean-Marc Sauvé calls on the Catholic Church to accept responsibility for these acts, not only individually but in a systemic way, stressing that she had not known “, even” not wanted “, to take up the subject. And he reiterates the recommendation of the commission to lift the secrecy of confession in cases of sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable persons, thus opposing the position of the Church for which the secrecy of confession should be inviolable.

For him, the introspection of the Church on the abuses which took place in the Anglo-Saxon countries, then in Northern Europe and now in France, must continue in Southern Europe and beyond the Mediterranean, there. where the subject is absolutely not discussed at the moment.