The cry grew louder. Since [quelques années, la] wave of denunciations of sexual assault is breaking out with the #MeToo movement and its many variations, such as Ni Una Menos (“Not one less”), without forgetting the feminist anthem of the Chilean collective Las Tesis, which has spread across the whole planet thundering: “You are the rapist! » ; the man, but also all the institutions (police, justice, State) which still too often guarantee him impunity more than they protect the victims. The UN no longer hesitates to describe violence against women as a scourge, which ranges from “ordinary” harassment to femicide and rape. This violence cannot affect so many people without there existing to varying degrees what the feminist Andrea Dworkin has called a “hatred of women”, and without the intersecting of different systems of oppression – patriarchy, capitalism, racism, colonialism — which help to perpetuate them.
Echoing this immense fed up of women, another cry has also continued to tear the silence: that of the boys and adolescents of yesterday who have become men but remain forever the victims of sexual abuse committed on them by priests and religious, which the Catholic Church has sought to deny and hide by all means for decades, as we know. In this case, too, we can speak of a scourge — especially since there is also the reality of abused nuns — which engages the very responsibility of the institution and not just of the abusers alone. The Church therefore finds herself plunged into a serious crisis, which shows her to be in contradiction with the very message of the Gospel and disqualifies her in her claims to want to regulate sexual morality. If we have already touched on this difficult subject […]we choose [cette fois] to integrate it into the continuum of our reflections on systemic sexual violence with certainly differentiated, but also common causes.
ideas in review
One of these causes is found in male domination, in the patriarchy which continues to structure in several respects the relations of power, the institutions and the symbolic representations between human beings. This domination branches out into clericalism, the seat of “male power” in the Church, rightly considered by Pope Francis to be a central cause of the problem of sexual assault within it; abuses which are always also “abuse of power and of conscience”, as he puts it well in his Letter to the People of God. […]
In his book with the unforgettable title, Please do not abuse (Seuil, 2021), the Jesuit Patrick C. Goujon recalls, not without shuddering, what it means to abuse a person: “possessing them when they are not in a position to refuse. […] Use until the object disappears”. Repeatedly abused by a priest when he was a child, he places the notion of trauma in the equation in his story. […]. Patrick C. Goujon, after a long journey, was finally able to file a complaint — without success, but this gesture freed his memory like his speech, making him scream “ […] what had been petrified. I finally heard this cry so long ossified! To vociferate it brought me back to life at once,” he wrote.
We are back to our starting point, to the cry. To the importance of liberated, saving speech, a path to healing and solidarity with other victims of abuse and aggression with whom to seek justice and reparation. Thousands of cases and decades of struggle show in a revolting way what it takes in suffering, perseverance and courage to free this voice and try to make it heard. […]
But when the omerta is finally broken, and although the impunity protecting the aggressors remains widespread and intolerable, progress is possible. Convictions are underway in several sectors of society, commissions and reforms are finally launched, limitation periods are abolished, new laws are emerging, such as the one aimed at creating a court specializing in matters of sexual violence and domestic violence. in Quebec, etc. This is a sign that we are finally ceasing to consider gender-based and sexual violence as private matters, repugnant news items, in order to confront them for what they are: an urgent collective, political, cultural — and ecclesial — issue. This is an important step, which will allow us to unite better against this violence that only deep cultural, institutional and structural transformations will make it possible to eradicate.
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