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Denver – A shocking new report from an independent commission has revealed that over 3,000 French clergymen working in the French Catholic Church since the 1950s were pedophiles.
The report showed that French clergymen sexually abused over 200,000 children over the past 70 years.
The commission released the preliminary figures ahead of a full report release on Tuesday. While the commission stated it would work to make sure “such tragedies” would no longer occur, it stopped short of any attempts to establish “personal responsibility” for the incidents it documented.
“Faced with this scourge, for a very long time the Catholic Church’s immediate reaction was to protect itself as an institution and it has shown complete, even cruel, indifference to those having suffered abuse,” Reuters quoted the report as saying.
The three-year investigation required the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team across a wide range of subjects to fully address the scope of the matter.
“We had to cross historical, sociological, medical, and psychiatric perspectives. We had to call upon skills in the area of child protection, social work, questions of abuse and also bring to bear skills in the area of theology and law,” stated Jean-Marc Sauve, the commission’s president.
The overwhelming majority of the victims were young boys working for the church at the time of their abuse, according to the report. The committee listened to the stories of thousands of these victims that were subject to traumatizing experiences at the hands of church authorities.
In his testimony to investigators, one victim, Christian Dubreuil, described his abuse as “a season of hell.” “They are still in denial, contempt, and minimize the issues,” he stated. Dubreuil retold the story of how he was sexually abused while working in the church at the age of eleven.
Although abuse has been a long-known issue within the catholic church, coverups have made it hard to gauge its extent and the number of victims that have been impacted by the issue. Despite Church-issued apologies, many critics have pointed out the lack of actual change the Church is implementing to fix the rampant problem.
In June of this year, representatives of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a formal letter protesting the “obstruction and lack of cooperation by the Catholic Church” in addressing and identifying abusers within their system. The UN letter notably urged for church authorities to begin cooperating with any local or national authorities investigating abuse allegations.
Although these perpetrators have enjoyed relative immunity for years under the protection of the church, this latest report and growing calls for justice coupled mean many of these abusers are likely to answer for their actions for the first time in history.
“This report will show the collective responsibility of the church,” stated one activist. “We will finally have figures on the scale of the abuse, collected scientifically. We have been waiting for this for years.”
