AN APPALLING REPORT FROM FRANCE

An official report has just been released in France that verges on the unbelievable. The word appalling comes to mind but even that is not strong enough for the grossly shocking content of the report. 

The report is a 2,500 page detailed accounting of sex abuse in the French Catholic church from 1950 to 2020. The numbers are staggering. At least 330,000 children were abused, some in unspeakable ways. Eighty percent of the victims were boys. Some 3,000 priests and lay persons under church auspices carried out these crimes. The report also shows how the Church covered up these crimes in a systematic manner. The whole horror is mind-boggling and sickening to the core. 

NPR has a detailed article on this here . A CNN article on this may be found here .

On second thought, perhaps we should not be so shocked by the new French report which simply duplicates what has happened in many countries, including the U.S. Right at home, the Diocese of Charleston has had its share of abuse and cover up for which it has paid out millions in litigation. A few years ago, an equally sickening report was published in Ireland. When the Catholic Church there subsequently put up a website giving people the opportunity to remove their names from church rolls, the site crashed under the volume and was removed. Since the Irish report, the Catholic Church itself in Ireland has crashed as a cultural beacon.

There were two sins/crimes in this and similar reports, the abuse and the cover-up. Individual clergy and lay workers may have made the abuses, but the institution of the church tried to hide the crimes and/or did nothing about them. Both the individual and the Church were guilty of wrongdoing.

Organized religion has taken a big hit in recent history, much of which was self-created. Before 1789 the Catholic Church in Europe made two grave errors. In one, it fought against science until it had little intellectual credibility of its own. In the second, it formed a coalition with monarchy and aristocracy to control society. The French Revolution of 1789, and ensuing revolutions across the western world, inevitably attacked established religion. The French Catholic Church never really recovered. The Church in France, and indeed across Europe, has declined sharply in influence in the Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Centuries.

In the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries the Catholic Church made two disastrous mistakes. It failed to take a significant stand against totalitarianism (Hitler was never excommunicated). Indeed, Catholic clergy sometimes actively aided fascist regimes, as in Spain. The other was to deny, cover-up, and resist justice as pervasive child sexual abuse became known within the Church. This made the Church itself complicit in sin/crime. The Church has yet fully to come to terms with either of the two grave failings of recent decades. The new report from France will simply pour fuel on the fire that is burning down the contemporary church, perhaps symbolized by the fire at Notre Dame de Paris in 2019.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the literal and figurative predominate institution in Europe. Symbolizing its power, almost all the great cities and towns were dominated by soaring cathedrals, the greatest of which, in my opinion, was Chartres. 

The decline, and impending fall, of the Church in modern history is partly its own fault and partly not its fault. If the Church is unable to clean up its own house today, it will lose all of what is left of its moral and ethical supremacy and institutional relevance. Its future would be oblivion. 

The latest alarm bell is the report today from France, first daughter of the Church.