Pedophilia in the Church: "Clerical predation remains at a significant level, although lower than in the first decades of the period analyzed"

Member of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE) and Director of Studies at the Practical School of Advanced Studies, the sociologist and historian Philippe Portier led, from the archives, a sociohistoric survey onSexual violence committed by priests or religious on minors and vulnerable adults.

With his research team made up of Paul Airiau, doctor of religious history, Thomas Boullu, doctor of law history, and Anne Lancien, doctor of political science, he had access to the archives of dioceses (only one refused themaccess), religious congregations, in the national archives of the Church as well as those of justice.He traces the main results from this work concerning the number and characteristics of abusers' ecclesiastics, the profile of their victims and the attitude of the institution concerning these attacks.

Have you been able to determine how many priests and religious authors of sexual violence on minors Dioceses and congregations have known since 1950?

We have sought to know how much we could spot priests and religious abusers since 1950, through the archives of the Church, the testimonies at the Ciase and the judicial files.They are about 3,000, whose identity is known and whose actions are proven.Of these 3,000, the Church knew 1,800, present in the archives by name.Since 1950, the Church has about 110,000 priests and religious - the nuns are very few among the sexual abusers, a dozen.This gives a rate of abusers of around 3 %, which places France at the bottom of the range established by surveys made in other countries [United States, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Netherlands].

This is a floor of course, a minimum number.We should never confuse "apparent crime" with "real crime".However, this is a very solid floor whose elements are attested with certainty in the documents we have.The gap between the French situation and foreign situations is explained by the modalities of our investigation, carried out as close as possible to the archives, but also by the model of relations which was established in France between the Church, the Stateand society.

How did the distribution of abuse evolve over time?

We spot three periods.The first runs until the early 1970s. This is the culminating period of abuse.Then comes a phase of decline in the number of abusers identified;It lasted until the mid-1990s. Finally, there is stabilization, with a slightly ascending slope in the 1990s-2010s, without ever reaching, very far from there, the level of the years 1950-1960.There is therefore, in 2010-2020, much fewer abusers declared or spotted than at the start of the period.

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