When I was a girl, every Sunday my mother got up and took my sisters and me to church. I’ll admit, I would have preferred to follow the example of my father, who chose to sleep in. I didn’t like going to church, didn’t like the fire and brimstone message of the pastor. Once I was old enough to attend catechism class, he taught us about predestination. I took it to mean, our whole course in life having been laid out in advance, it didn’t really matter if I was bad or good.
My sisters and I were faithful Sunday School attenders; we were also members of the youth choir, which practiced on Wednesday evenings. Contrary to the Sunday service, this was one of the high points of our week. The choir was led by Mrs. Dorothy Loy, who filled us with a love of music and taught us song is prayer and praise. We sang religious anthems, but we also had a vast repertoire of folk songs, popular music, and tunes from Broadway shows.
Once a year, we put on a show, complete with props and multiple costume changes. We loved it and so did our audience, who paid to attend. With that money, we went on bus trips to Washington D.C. or the 1964 New York World’s Fair. There I remember seeing Michelangelo’s Pietà, bathed in blue light, in the Vatican Pavilion. Still today, when I get together with my sisters, we burst into song, remembering lyrics we learned with Mrs. Loy.
Except for the choir, Sunday School did not make a lasting impression. I did, however, have another religious experience that deeply marked me, one I wrote about in this column many years ago. On Mondays after school, I went to “Good News Club,” a religious service led by Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Nancy Hubler, who accompanied us on the piano when we sang. I loved going to those “meetings,” as I called them. I did not consider them “church,” in the sense that I was never bored and I never left a “meeting” with the heavy sense of religion as duty.
In the 1960’s, I never came across a woman ordained as pastor, yet thinking back, I realize that women, not men, were the “pastors” of my religious education. They may not have had the authority accorded a duly ordained minister or priest, but they surely possessed the power to touch and guide children’s hearts and lives.
Today in France, these memories resonate all the more deeply at a time when the French Catholic Church is undergoing a deep crisis directly related to authority. Last October 5th, the Sauvé report, as it is known, commissioned in 2018 by the French Conference of Bishops, was released to the public. Its subject is sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church from 1950 to the present and the revelations are devastating.
On October 5th, Mr. Jean-Marc Sauvé, who presided the commission that prepared the report, solemnly presented it to Monseigneur Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, President of the Conference of Bishops, and to Sister Véronique Magron, President of the Religious of France. After reading the report, Véronique Magron declared, “the extent of the catastrophe is such that no one can say, that’s impossible, or we didn’t know.”
It is not easy to summarize a report of over 500 pages, with an annex of 2000 pages of testimonies of victims, that it took an independent commission two and a half years to prepare. To begin, there are the figures, the result of rigorous methodology, that estimate that since 1950, 330,000 minors (a figure based on victims still alive today) were abused by priests, women religious, or lay members of the French Catholic Church. A study of Church archives estimates that between 2,900 to 3,200 pedophiles were active in those years in the Church. These figures, which remain an estimate, represent human lives, many destroyed.
Jean-Luc Souveton, a priest who was sexually abused at age 15, reminds his fellow religious that the victims have had to work very hard to reconstruct their lives, and they continue to suffer still today because the institution that abused them does not accord them the consideration they deserve. “We need justice,” he declares for himself and all victims.
During his closing speech at the 2021 Conference of Bishops held earlier this month in Lourdes, Monseigneur de Moulins-Beaufort quoted a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, “This people’s heart has grown callous; they hardly hear with their ears and their eyes are closed” to characterize the decades-long attitude of the French Catholic Church. In a news conference, he also recognized the systemic role of the Church: final responsibility for these crimes against children lies not with a few isolated individuals, but belongs to the institution in its entirety. All are not guilty, but all are responsible.
The Sauvé report has become a source of indignation and debate in all of French society. Will the recognition of institutional responsibility bring about a revolution in the Catholic Church in France? Will church governance change? How should these hundreds of thousands of victims be recognized by the Church today? Is it even possible to ask for forgiveness? Some call for the resignation of all members of the Conference of Bishops, as was the case in Chile after a huge sexual-abuse scandal in 2018. Others underline the relative powerlessness of the French Church, whose decisions must be sanctioned by the Vatican. Still others would like to see Canon Law revised, so that these sexual crimes be attached to the breaking of Commandments.
Jean-Charles Thomas, a retired French bishop, attributes a part of the problem to depriving women of authority. In an article in Ouest-France, an important regional daily, he points out that women do ¾’s of the work within the Church, yet they have no voice in major decisions. He, for one, wants this to change. Some of the testimonies of the Sauvé report point to cases of women religious abusing girls, but the lion’s share of the abuse was committed by men.
In 2020, when a successor was needed to replace the Bishop of Lyon, who had resigned because of a sexual-abuse scandal in his diocese, Anne Soupa, a French theologian, applied in protest over the place of women in the Catholic Church.
As for me, I’m grateful Mrs. Loy and Mrs. Lawrence were there when I was a child.
