French bishops recognise church ‘responsibility’ f

Issued on: 05/11/2021 - 13:47

Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the Bishops' Conference of France (CEF), attends the publishing of a damning report on decades of sexual abuse by church officials on October 5, 2021 in Paris. © Thomas Coex, AFP/FileText by:NEWS WIRES1 min

French bishops said on Friday they accepted that the Catholic church bore an “institutional responsibility” in the many thousands of child abuse cases documented in a shock report.

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The Bishops Conference at its annual meeting also recognised that the church was guilty of allowing the abuses to become “systemic”, conference president Eric de Moulins-Beaufort said, a month after the report detailed the abuse of 216,000 minors over seven decades.

On October 5, an independent commission examining abuses between 1950 and 2020, called them a “massive phenomenon” that had been covered up for decades by a “veil of silence”.

The nearly 2,500-page report found that the “vast majority” of victims were pre-adolescent boys from a variety of social backgrounds.

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De Moulins-Beaufort at the time expressed his “shame and horror” at the findings, while Pope Francis said he felt “great sorrow”.

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Although their annual meeting was not entirely dedicated to the response to the report, the 120 bishops from across France have devoted much of their ongoing week-long meeting to “the fight against violence and sexual aggression directed at minors”.

Victims of abuse had called on the bishops to admit that, beyond the guilt of individual attackers, the church itself had been at fault as an institution.