The Church’s Difficult Path to Transparency
Will the “Abbé Pierre affair” mark a turning point in the Church’s attitude towards sexual violence? The Pope, on the plane returning from a grueling twelve-day trip to Asia, was asked when the Holy See became aware of the criminal behavior of the founder of Emmaus. “I don’t know when the Vatican discovered (what he is accused of), because I wasn’t there, and the idea of investigating it never occurred to me, but after (his) death, that’s for sure,” he said, before adding: “We must be clear about these things, not cover them up.” A statement revealing the Vatican’s erratic policy on sexual violence cases. Because as early as last August, investigations by Le Monde and Libération showed that two cardinals and several bishops were informed in 1955. Then the opening of the archives of the Episcopal Conference confirmed the level of information of the Catholic hierarchy: in 1959, the representative of the Pope in France opposed a trip by Abbé Pierre to Canada, according to a letter consulted by Libération.
Was this information “forgotten”, according to a logic of omerta that the same investigations have shown to have been at work at Emmaüs? When Abbé Pierre died in 2007, the Vatican did not reveal the dark side of the icon, while we know today that public recognition of the violence suffered by victims, even after the death of the aggressor, is an essential condition for a process of reparation. In 2010, the Holy See nevertheless recognized the sexual crimes of another admired priest, Marcial Maciel, who died in 2008. This Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ was very prominent with Pope John Paul II despite acts of pedophilia reported as early as 1956.
A culture of silence
One thing is clear: the good intentions expressed, for example, in Pope Francis’ Letter to the People of God (2018) (“The pain of the victims has been silenced for too long”) have not been enough to change the Vatican’s culture regarding cases of sexual violence. They are always recognized under pressure from the media. And with difficulty. The case of the former Jesuit Marko Rupnik is emblematic. Accused of assaults in 1994, then of dozens of rapes, the artist whose mosaics adorn many sanctuaries was nevertheless invited to preach a Lenten meditation at the Vatican in 2020, before the press gave his victims a voice in 2022. In 2014, Pope Francis appointed a Commission for the Protection of Minors tasked with “proposing initiatives to protect minors and vulnerable adults”. But several of its members left it with a bang (Mary Collins, a former victim, in 2017, Hans Zollner, a Jesuit, in 2023), criticizing the obstacles placed by the curia in its functioning.
In France, in 2019, the bishops commissioned an independent commission to investigate sexual abuse of minors. Its report (Ciase, 2021), following work of unparalleled scope, pointed to a systemic cause of sexual violence, that is to say linked to the functioning of the Church (exercise of authority, intimacy, discourse, protection of aggressors, etc.). But the Vatican Curia distanced itself from this disturbing analysis, and the Pope avoided meeting the authors of the report. It is difficult to receive criticism from outside. “We must not hide,” Francis told the journalists who accompanied him to Asia. Faced with the emotion aroused by the revelations about Abbé Pierre, the French bishops opened the archives of the Episcopal Conference. In a column published on September 16 by Le Monde, Bishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the Conference of Bishops of France, acknowledged the silence, deadly for the victims, of those who knew and said nothing, then invited the Vatican to study its own archives and say “what the Holy See knew and when it knew it.”
