In France, Catholic priests allegedly abused around 216,000 children according to a commission, which has analyzed church-related child abuse in the EU country since 1950. Report by the British public broadcaster BBC.
The investigation in this predominantly Catholic country was commissioned by the French Catholic Church in 2018. An independent commission spent more than two and a half years combing through court, police and church records and speaking to victims and witnesses.
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Jean-March Sauvé, a senior French official who chaired the commission, assessed Tuesday, October 5, during the presentation of the results of the investigation, that until the beginning of the 2000s, the Catholic Church had “shown a deep, even cruel indifference towards the victims”.
The commission found evidence of a minimum of 2,900 to 3,200 abusers – out of a total of 115,000 priests and other clerics – and the vast majority of the victims were pre-teens from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Convictions are not expected as most of the cases assessed by the panel could see their legal limit exceeded under French law, the BBC reports.
