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By Christophe Henning | France
When the Catholic bishops of France set up an independent commission in 2018 to throw light on the sexual abuse of minors in the Church dating back to 1950 they chose a highly regarded civil servant to head it.
Jean-Marc Sauvé, a public law specialist who spent most of his career at the country's Council of State, accepted the challenge to preside over the Independent Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse within the Church (CIASE).
And over the past two years he and his team of experts have worked hard "to analyze the causes underlying the manner in which these matters were handled".
They are currently drawing up "recommendations based on an evaluation of the measures taken since the year 2000".
The (CIASE) has received more than 5,000 calls from victims in the past year alone.
And while the majority of them were abused as minors, Mr. Sauvé said his committee has also been hearing from a significant number of people who were spiritually abused after they were already adults.
La Croix's Christophe Henning spoke to him about the issue.
La Croix: On June 3, 2019, the commission that you head issued a call for witnesses. The particular situation of adult victims of sexual assault seems to be emerging.
Jean-Marc Sauvé: Our work is far from over. We are in the middle of the ford, and the Commission at this stage is bringing more questions than conclusions.
This does not preclude certain observations: the appeal aimed to gather the testimony of those who were abused as minors as well as vulnerable adults who, in a relationship of authority, control, direction of conscience or spiritual guidance, were engaged in a sexual relationship that was not freely consensual.
To date, after receiving several thousand reports, 12 to 13 percent of the reports have come from people who were adults at the time of the events. The adults remain a clear minority.
Was the appeal from CIASE an opportunity to break the silence for these victims?
The victim sometimes persists in silence for a long time because the suffering is too great, because the evidence of abuse has been slow to emerge or because an unjustified feeling of guilt may have arisen.
As the statute of limitations is much stricter for adults, there are few effective remedies before the courts.
The suffering of an adult victim of sexual abuse is specific and has a particular dimension of abuse of conscience and spiritual abuse.
What can you say about these adult victims?
There is a clear majority of women among them.
Among the victims, some of them belonged - sometimes still belong - to the clergy or to religious communities.
On the other hand, almost a third were seminarians and religious in formation, which sheds a very special light on these victims.
How can we explain the great vulnerability of these adults?
Some were more vulnerable because there was a relationship of trust with a cleric, a seminary professor, an accompanist.
While the abuse of a minor proceeds from the objectification of the child's body and clearly falls within the framework of an abuse of authority aggravated by the sacred figure of the priest, the abuse of an adult has its own perversity which combines elements of abuse of authority, as well as forms of abuse of conscience.
The abuse of adults, even more than child molestation, fits well with the diagnosis made by Pope Francis in his Letter to the People of God denouncing the trilogy of "abuse of authority and conscience, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse".
Can we identify the forms these abuses take?
It is also very disturbing to see to what extent spirituality and Scripture could have been misused to develop a strategy of predation and to satisfy sexual impulses, using the Song of Songs for example, or the idea more or less expressed that the common law would not apply to chosen ones or to a spiritual elite, or even a gross denaturation of the Marian cult…
There are adult victims in congregations: is this a risk factor?
I don't consider the community to be suspicious at all on principle.
The question is to know how abuses of a personal nature could become systemic: as soon as he assumes an important hierarchical function, an abuser can foster the emergence of a system of abuse, all the more if he is a founder.
In the Church, as in any human society, positions of power and responsibility can be distorted and become abusive.
Hence the importance of the choice of superiors, limits on powers, term limits and internal regulatory mechanisms.
New communities, by definition, cannot have accumulated the treasures of experience and wisdom of the spiritual families that came from St. Benedict, St. Dominic or St. Ignatius.
But neither the diocesan clergy nor the so-called historical orders have been safe from abuses.
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