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Shaken by one of his country's worst clergy sex abuse cases, a permanent deacon in France created an organization to fight "pedocriminality"
THEO GIACOMETTI POUR LA CROIX
By Coralie Bonnefoy | France
François Debelle sits behind his desk with outstretched hands, palms face-up.
"Christianity does not solve evil, but it shows us the two hands we have at the end of our arms!" he exclaims.
The 58-year-old engineer and native of the Champagne region in northeast France describes himself as a "doer".
He says it's something he learned as a child, growing up in a family where Catholicism was "not moralistic, but committed and generous".
His mother, a teacher by training, was his hometown's deputy mayor in charge of social action. And his father, the director of an agricultural cooperative, was always ready to help.
"People used to come to the house and it was natural. The feeling was that if there were things to do, then we might as well do them!" he says.
The "Jonas" network to fight pedocriminality
Debelle, who now lives in the south of France, put the two concepts to use in 2018 when he and some associates founded "Jonas", a network and resource center designed to help fight the sex abuse of minors, what the French very pointedly call "pedocriminality".
Why did a married man with five "magnificent" children, with a successive career as a regional director of a major social housing firm, choose to tackle this "repulsive" issue?
Debelle says immediately that it has nothing to do with anything that happened in his personal life.
Rather, it's connected to his vocation as a permanent deacon.
Having been ordained to the diaconate in 2008 for the Archdiocese of Marseilles, he says this ministry has been "a great joy" for him that he shares with those he accompanies in baptism or marriage.
A few years before his ordination, Debelle moved from his job as a private business consultant to his current post in the public housing sector.
He says child protection felt like an obvious choice for him.
"We deal with all the issues of life here. We often come across damaged children, sometimes victims of rape or sexual assault, for whom it is our responsibility to provide support," he explains.
Then in 2016 one for France's most notorious cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors made the headlines.
Bernard Preynat, a former priest in the Archdiocese of Lyon, was charged with sexually assaulting numerous boys in the 1970s and 1980s. He was finally sentenced in 2020 to five years in prison.
"All over the world, similar stories are emerging. The numbers are abominable. I realized at the time that we are not talking about some 'black sheep', but that we have a deep, systemic problem," Debelle says.
He points to the institution's initial act of "denial".
The deacon is confident that "with the Sauvé Commission [investigating abuse] and the efforts of the bishops' conference and many Catholics, the Church is capable of recovering and becoming a safe place".
But he also admits that the Preynat Affair has left him badly bruised as a member of the clergy.
"I felt co-responsible; I really thought about hanging up my alb," he says, describing the temptation he felt to resign from ministry.
But rather than leave the Church, he chose to do something.
Refusing to walk away, staying to fight
Drinking coffee from a mug labeled "Insertion through housing", Debelle clicks on his computer and goes to the website of "Jonas".
"Faced with a scourge of this issue, I said to myself that we need to offer people information, to bring this to light," he summarizes.
And that's how the anti-pedocriminality network came to be in 2018.
The site offers a multitude of media resources to understand the roots of pedocriminality: thematic articles, files of reading materials, videos, links to associations that help victims and so forth.
A group of contributors offer up-to-date legal texts, review book on the issue and someone even examined the presence of pedophilia in the works of the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903).
The objective is bring the issue of pedophilia out of the shadows.
"The rape of a child is the unspeakable. The absolute taboo. Because they disgust us, we do not want to represent these crimes. We only try to escape them," continues the founder of Jonas.
Contributors to the online network include a dozen volunteer citizens, teachers, a retired journalist, a former commissioner and a lawyer.
Under Debelle's leadership, they "look where it's ugly" in order to help the general public better "understand", "prevent" and "contribute" to eliminating pedocriminality.
The permanent deacon is convinced that this issue, as dark and frightening as it may be, must be appropriated and understood by everyone in order to better fight it.
He sees his network as "a brick" in a wall that can be built only by the help of many hands working together.
"We're not out of the woods," he says, smiling over his cup of coffee. "But it feels good to at least do something."
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