French bishops say church bore 'institutional responsibility' for child abuse

The French bishops recently said that they accepted that the Catholic church bore an "institutional responsibility" in the thousands of child abuse cases which were revealed in a shocking report. In its annual meeting, the Bishops Conference president Eric de Moulins-Beaufort said that the church was guilty of allowing the abuses to become "systemic."

"This responsibility implies a duty to provide justice and reparation," the archbishop said.

The commission has recommended that the church accepts civil and social responsibility for the abuses. Also, it has been said that the financial compensation should be calculated for each individual case based on the severity of abuses suffered.

This comes after an independent inquiry in October revealed that sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and other clergymen has had 216,000 victims between 1950 and 2020. This was called a "massive phenomenon" that was hushed up by a "veil of silence".

The annual meeting was not entirely dedicated to the response to the report. However, the 120 bishops from different parts of France have devoted much of their week-long meeting to "the fight against violence and sexual aggression directed at minors".

The abuse victims were invited to join the meeting.

Many victims declined the invite as they were against the decision to make the sexual abuse scandal just one of several topics.

The report was released after an investigation of two and a half years. It was launched after widespread outrage over a string of paedophilia claims and prosecutions against Church officials worldwide.

The report of the inquiry, at nearly 2,500 pages, found that the "vast majority" of victims were pre-adolescent boys from a wide variety of social backgrounds.

"The Catholic Church is, after the circle of family and friends, the environment that has the highest prevalence of sexual violence," the report said.