The report of the Sauvé Commission continues to shake people’s minds and spark debate, especially on the secrecy of confession. Should a priest who learns in confession that a child has been abused keep the secret or, on the contrary, lift it, so that the child can be protected? What does this secret represent, for the victims, as for the aggressors?
franceinfo: what does the secret of confession imply?
Claude Halmos. Confession secrecy is assimilated in France, by case law, to professional secrecy, which applies to doctors and lawyers, and which allows people who consult them to be able to trust them. This argument is therefore very logically invoked by those who oppose, in the Church, the lifting of the secrecy of confession.
In what case can the secrecy of confession be lifted?
The law now obliges caregivers to lift professional secrecy if what they learn concerns the endangering of minors under 15, or vulnerable people. And it is essential so that this secrecy does not serve to cover up crimes. That is to say does not become the equivalent of that which their authors always demand – by emotional blackmail or by threat – of their victims. But it is also important for the victims.
If a caregiver learns from a child, that he is a victim, and does nothing, the child finds himself, as in assaults, without protection, in total helplessness, and with, as a result, a desperate vision of the world. , which we find in adolescents who are doing very badly… And if the child talks to a priest, and nothing happens, it may be even worse. Because the priest is, in confession, an intermediary in relation to God, the child may think that God himself can do nothing against the aggressors. Whereas if the caregiver or the priest explains to the child that he is the victim of a crime, that he must be protected, and his aggressor punished, they bear witness to a civilized world where the law and adults protect; and it is a fulcrum for its reconstruction.
Isn’t the secrecy of confession important for pedophiles who would like to change?
If they wanted to change, they would understand the lifting of secrecy. But what practice teaches is that, if pedophiles speak, it is generally either to prevent possible trouble, by playing goodwill, and by staging a suffering intended to make people forget that of the victims. Or, even worse, because to put, with all impunity, a priest or a doctor in the position of powerless spectators of horrors which, held in secrecy, they cannot denounce, is for them the source of an additional pleasure.
It’s hard to hear, but essential to understand that perverts are not, as we all too often believe, “crazy people”: they know exactly what they are doing. And to take the measure of the horror in which their victims are still plunged.
> Pedocriminality in the Church: “I am in shock, my heart cries in me”, declares a priest who launches a whistleblower