Bishops, priests, leaders of religious orders and some faithful have “remember” to the victims of pedocriminality, Saturday in Lourdes, by meditating in front of a photo and by organizing a prayer of repentance at the sanctuary. Gathered in Lourdes, all the bishops came to an agreement on Friday to recognize the institutional responsibility of the Church in this violence against children for decades.
After having recognized on Friday his responsibility in sexual crimes against minors and their dimension “systemic” over the past seventy years, the episcopate, meeting in plenary assembly since Tuesday, has performed “two symbolic gestures”. First of all, a memorial gesture: a photo, taken in a church by a victim, showing a sculpture of the head of a crying child, has been unveiled. Sealed to the wall of the hemicycle in which the episcopate meets, it prefigures the construction of a “place of memory”, decided in March by the bishops, but the details of which remain to be defined.
– Laurent Ferriere
“We want to mark this place of Lourdes for a first visual testimony that will remember so much violence, drama and aggression”, said Hugues de Woillemont, spokesperson for the French Bishops’ Conference (CEF). Véronique Margron, president of Corref (religious orders), underlined the “misfortune” and the “collapse” that have “intrudes into lives that only asked to grow, live, trust”.
– Valentine chapuis
Second gesture: the 120 bishops, who were not dressed in their liturgical clothes at the request of the victims, religious, priests and laity then participated in a prayer of penance and asked, after the slow toll of the death knell, “forgiveness to God” on the esplanade of the Notre-Dame du Rosaire basilica. “Raise up the people who are suffering, we beg you on our knees. Give us to listen to them and to do what they ask of us”, implored Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the CEF.
– Valentine chapuis