There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, nuns and members of religious orders. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
Those who keep a dirty eye on children, sexually abuse them are called paedophiles. Recently a report has surfaced that exposed the ugly faces of many priests and shook the world.
Thousands of paedophiles have operated inside the French Catholic Church since 1950, the head of an independent commission investigating the scandal told , days ahead of the release of its report. The commission’s research had uncovered between 2,900 and 3,200 paedophile priests or other members of the church, said Jean-Marc Sauve, adding that it was “a minimum estimate”.
The commission’s report is due to be released on Tuesday after two and a half years of research based on church, court and police archives, as well as interviews with witnesses.
The report, which Sauve said runs to 2,500 pages, will attempt to quantify both the number of offenders and the number of victims.
It will also look into “the mechanisms, notably institutional and cultural ones” within the Church which allowed paedophiles to remain, and will offer 45 proposals.
The independent commission was set up in 2018 by the French Catholic Church in response to a number of scandals that shook the Church in France and worldwide.
Its formation also came after Pope Francis passed a landmark measure obliging those who know about sex abuse in the Catholic Church to report it to their superiors.
Made up of 22 legal professionals, doctors, historians, sociologists and theologians, its brief was to investigate allegations of child sex abuse by clerics dating back to the 1950s.
When it began its work it called for witness statements and set up a telephone hotline, then reported receiving thousands of messages in the months that followed.
The report will be delivered to the CEF and the CORREF and released at a press conference Tuesday to which representatives of victims’ associations are invited.
“It’s not going to go easy on anyone,” said Philippe Portier, a sociologist who was part of the commission.
“It will have the effect of a bomb”, added Olivier Savignac, of the victims’ association Parler et Revivre.
Bishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, the president of the CEF, said he feared the report would reveal “significant and frightening figures”, during a meeting with parishioners from his diocese.
A message from Church authorities to priests and parishes ahead of weekend masses warned that the report’s publication would be “a harsh and serious moment”, which calls for “an attitude of truth and compassion”.
Sauve had said in November that the handling of suspected paedophile cases “in the past has often been faulty”.
He said it was “extremely serious that there could have been some institutions and some communities, in small number, where systemic abuses could have been committed”.
In most cases, however, prosecution is unlikely because the abuse occurred beyond French statutes of limitations, and it remains unclear what actions the church itself will take against offenders.
The report is expected to be closely studied at the Vatican, where the issue was raised by the pope in September during a meeting with French bishops.
Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been reported as far back as the 11th century, when Peter Damian wrote the treatise Liber Gomorrhianus against such abuses and others.
In the late 15th century, Katharina von Zimmern and her sister were removed from their abbey to live in their family’s house for a while partly because the young girls were molested by priests. In 1531, Martin Luther claimed that Pope Leo X had vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, “otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy.”
In the late 1940s, the American priest Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete, a religious order that treats Roman Catholic priests who struggle with personal difficulties such as substance abuse and sexual misconduct. In a series of letters and reports to high-ranking Catholic leaders starting in the 1950s, Fitzgerald warned of substantial problems with abusive priests. He wrote, for example, “[sexual abuse] offenders were unlikely to change and should not be returned to ministry.” He discussed the problem with Pope Paul VI (1963 – 1978) and “in correspondence with several bishops”.
In 2001, the Vatican first required that sex abuse cases be reported to the Vatican hierarchy; before that, it left management of the cases to local dioceses. After the 2002 revelation by The Boston Globe that cases of abuse were widespread in the Church in Massachusetts and elsewhere, The Dallas Morning News did a year-long investigation. It reported in 2004 that even after these revelations and public outcry, the institutional church had moved allegedly abusive priests out of the countries where they had been accused but assigned them again to “settings that bring them into contact with children, despite church claims to the contrary”. Among the investigation’s findings was that nearly half of 200 cases “involved clergy who tried to elude law enforcement.”
The cases received significant media and public attention in the United States, Ireland (where abuse was reported as widespread), and Canada, and throughout the world. In response to the attention, members of the church hierarchy have argued that media coverage has been excessive and disproportionate.
