PARIS, Europe Brief News — France’s Catholic Church on Monday succeeded in financially compensating victims of sexual abuse in what the president of the country’s bishops’ conference heralded as a “decisive step.”
In a speech, the conference president, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, declared that the Church would recognize its “institutional responsibility” and decided to follow “a course of recognition and reparation that paves the way for victims to receive a possibility of mediation and compensation.”.
The Bishops’ Conference held its annual meeting a month after a large-scale child sexual abuse report in the French Catholic Church was published.
The study published by an independent commission estimates that some 330,000 minors were sexually abused over 70 years by priests and other church-related figures.
“We felt revulsion and horror inside of us when we realized the amount of suffering that many people had to experience and are still experiencing,” Moulins-Beaufort said.
The bishops recognized that the Church’s responsibility involves financial compensation—the commission “emphatically suggested that path”—but also because “remorseful parishioners expect it of us,” he commented.
Moulins-Beaufort does not provide details on the amount of compensation or how the Church intends to pay.
The report released last month described the “systematic” cover-up of abuse by the Catholic Church and called on the Church to respect the law in France.
He added that the number of 330,000 victims includes an estimated 216,000 people abused by priests and other clergy members and the rest by ecclesiastical figures such as Scout leaders and camp counsellors. Those estimates are based on the most extensive investigation by France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research into child sexual abuse in the country.
France is a traditionally Catholic country but adheres to a strict form of secularism in public life based on a 1905 law separating Church and state.
