Martine, 73, and Mireille, 71, were sexually assaulted by a priest when they were teenage girls in high school. They both declined to give their last name due to privacy reasons, in part because some family members were not aware of the abuses.
“It brings on such terrible thoughts,” Martine said. “For me, personally, I had to wait for my parents to die” because otherwise she said it was “not possible” to speak out.
“I think that each victim experienced it as if they were the only one (victim), and that’s part of this phenomenon involving control and secrecy,” Mireille said. “We are in a condition of submission … in a mental captivity. So, we follow this person who suddenly takes power over us … We are caught in a spider web.”
A recognition of the fault is essential, she said, and financial compensation is “really symbolic … it won’t fix things but it means it will also cost them something.”
Olivier Savignac, the head of victims association Parler et Revivre (Speak Out and Live Again), contributed to the investigation. He told The Associated Press that the high ratio of victims per abuser was particularly “terrifying for French society, for the Catholic Church.”
Savignac assailed the church for treating such cases as individual anomalies instead of as a collective horror. He described being abused at age 13 by the director of a Catholic vacation camp in the south of France who was accused of assaulting several other boys.
“I perceived this priest as someone who was good, a caring person who would not harm me,” Savignac said. “But it was when I found myself on that bed half-naked and he was touching me that I realized something was wrong … It’s like gangrene inside the victim’s body and the victim’s psyche.”
The priest eventually was found guilty of child sexual abuse and sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison, including one year suspended.
The commission worked for 2 1/2 years, listening to victims and witnesses and studying church, court, police and news archives starting from the 1950s. Sauvé denounced the church’s attitude until the beginning of the 2000s as “a deep, cruel indifference toward victims.”
