Three hundred and thirty thousand. This is the number of children who have been victims of sexual abuse by members of the French clergy since 1950, according to an independent survey commissioned by the Church itself.
A few weeks after the revelation of this overwhelming figure, the French bishops have gathered in recent days in Lourdes to take note of the horror and to organize the first stages of reparation.
To last, any institution develops vigorous defense mechanisms. While each of us must resign ourselves to seeing our reflexes fade over the years, it is the opposite for institutions: each decade reinforces the instinctive gestures, conscious or not, intended to ensure its sustainability.
Since the Church is two thousand years old, let’s say that she knows a thing or two about self-defense. Black belt 21e dan.
This is why the decisions taken by the French bishops, if they have nothing objectively spectacular, still deserve to be underlined their seriousness.
Sell movable and immovable property to feed a victim compensation fund? Create an independent national body for the recognition of faults and their redress, also headed by a woman? To entrust the laity with the responsibility of leading all the reflection groups that should lead to a change of culture in ecclesial circles? Even yesterday, we could have considered these ideas as Church-fiction.
The Church of France has not only dropped to one knee: it has allowed its hands to be tied. Thus, she will no longer be able to dodge, at least in the near future, the truth that bounces right in her face.
The end of an era
It is the very tone with which the recognition of institutional responsibility for the crimes committed has come about that can convince us that the era of denial is finally coming to an end. During the penitential celebration last Saturday, the bishops bowed their heads, without their liturgical dress, while the victims gathered at their sides, standing upright.
No request for forgiveness from victims as in 2016, because the lesson of the time was learned: asking for forgiveness too easily becomes a shortcut in this kind of situation, in addition to representing an additional burden for the victim, summoned to respond. positively. Forgiveness, yes, no doubt, we will see; but repair first.
This repentance should be one of the ways forward for the Church as a whole, in the midst of a moral crisis. Not only because there are plenty of reasons for borrowing it (women, natives, homosexuals, etc.). But also because she would find there one of the ferments of her original fertility.
For the Church is the bearer and heir, following the Jewish people, of this powerful and original intuition: God is not necessarily on the winning side. It does not appear in the triumph of armies or from the pen of those who write the official version of history.
Unlike the accounts of natural religions, in which the strength and credibility of the gods depended largely on military success, the Bible portrays a people repeatedly humiliated in their dreams of greatness. A group of stubborn people who would have had every reason to give leave to their God, but who persevere, against all odds, in their faith and their hope.
Even more: this community finds part of the causes of its misfortunes in its own failings. She scrutinizes herself, she examines herself, she accuses herself when necessary. In the Bible, the renewal of the covenant with God always passes through a phase of repentance.
We recognize here the sources of what we call today, with some disdain, “Judeo-Christian guilt”. Of course, self-examination can become sickly, the awareness of one’s limits can turn to soreness. The feeling of guilt, in itself quite healthy and necessary for moral life, can be exploited by the executioners to further crush their victims.
Nevertheless, the religious intuition remains valid: if God is really love and justice, it is impossible to be its herald by force. If God has revealed himself as never before through an innocent man nailed to a cross, then loving becomes more important than winning.
Through its riches and its catechisms, the Church has spent several centuries in command, in seeking to be right. However, it was born of a people who, far from dictating the course of history, drew their vigor from having remained themselves despite all the dominions. She is the daughter of a people whose relevance, eternally topical, is to have been able to recognize their own violence and to make amends.
In short, if the path of repentance is difficult for the Church today to walk, it is not necessarily unnatural. Conversely, it is when she leaves him that she becomes an institution like any other, capable of course of many things, but certainly not of showing the face of the God in whom she believes.
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