French Catholic Church to compensate child sex abuse victims

By Cindi Cook

PARIS (AA) - The Roman Catholic Church in France has announced a plan to sell some of its assets to compensate thousands of victims of child sexual abuse by members of the clergy and lay members of the church since 1950.

The move comes after a major weekend gathering of the Bishops’ Conference of France (CEF).

The CEF announced that reparations would be made to 330,000 victims and that the church would use its own funds to do so, including selling some of its vast real estate holdings.

The conference was held in Lourdes, a southern French city that is considered a holy place for many Catholics, where it is said that the Virgin Mary appeared to a local woman in 1858. Millions of Catholics make a pilgrimage to Lourdes every year to visit the site -- the Grotto of Massabielle -- where the vision is said to have happened.

On Monday, the president of the conference, Bishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, commented on the very hard work which is only at the start.

“We arrived in Lourdes all very upset, bruised,” he said. “We understood that we had to go to the end of the work of truth.”

Although a regular occurrence, this year’s conference focused heavily on the arduous and painful task of analyzing what went wrong and how to repair it. The bishops listened as several victims gave testimony.

The moves come after the Oct. 5 issuance of a report titled “Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church, France, 1950-2020” conducted by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church that revealed the thousands of victims over seven decades.

Nine working groups made up of both clergy and lay people will be formed to focus on the distribution of funds. According to Radio France International, an independent task force will be set up to evaluate each claim and will be supervised by Marie Derain de Vaucresson, a renowned legal expert on child welfare.