The victims of sexual abuse in the Church, before the expected report in France

I arrive “shaking”, But it came out “quiet”. Eric Boone was the first victim heard by a commission investigating pedophilia in the Catholic Church in France. A Dominican friar sexually assaulted him in the 1980s, when he was between 12 and 15 years old, in a convent.

The Independent Commission on Abuse Sexual on the church (Ciase, for its acronym in French) since 1950, chaired by Jean-Marc Sauvé, must present a report of hundreds of pages, which concludes two and a half years of work.

An “act of memory”

Eric Boone, 49, was the first victim this commission heard from. The man arrived “trembling”, but came out “calm.”

A Dominican friar sexually assaulted him in the 1980s, when he was between 12 and 15 years old, in a convent in Toulouse (south), where he was studying Hebrew.

“I can’t say there isn’t a day that I don’t think about it,” he explains. “It is deeply destructive.”

Boone described the control process set in motion by his attacker, “a well-known theologian,” “brilliant,” in his thirties, who frequented his family until he “took action.”

“Unable to speak,” he was silent for about three decades.

But recently, this Catholic education worker entrusted himself to his relatives and denounced the events, “shocked” by a letter from Pope Francis about the abuse in 2018.

Eric has his hope pinned on him report of the Sauvé Commission, which will include all the auditions of the victims.

“It will be like a monument, like an act of memory. They are writings that will remain and no one will be able to say that it was not true (…) It will make my own story part of a larger story ”.

The man does not expect, then, the “consolation” of the church, but rather a “profound conversion”, that acts, that “is reformed from this reality”, even in the theological field.

“Daily torture”

“It is not written on my face, but it is almost daily torture. You have to rebuild over time, ”explains Marie-Claire Silvestre, 63.

Your attacker? A priest, who was also his uncle and who has already passed away.

“A person who was admired by my parents, my grandmother” and the parishioners, who perpetrated “touching” and “raping” his niece in “the kitchen and the presbytery” in a town, where he spent the holidays.

According to Silvestre, one of his brothers and one of his sisters were also victims of their aggressions. The first committed suicide in 2004 and the second died of alcoholism.

“The Sauvé Commission is very important to me”, to them and to “all victims that they will never be able to speak. On the commission’s website, which made a form available for each victim, the woman entered the names of her siblings.

Marie-Claire did not report the case, since she started talking about the attacks long after the fact. In the search for information, he recently tried in vain to find other victims and requesting eventual files on the priest from the diocese, without success.

“Is it normal that in the 1960s he was transferred more than four times?”

This former nursing assistant confesses the pain caused by the doubts of those close to her: “Are you sure, wasn’t it a dream? You were very small! ”.

His story was “captured” in a book that was published in the spring.

She expects from the Sauvé Commission, in view of the one who spoke in September 2020, that puts “the truth on the table”.

And of those responsible catholic? “It is in their hands,” says the woman, without having too many illusions. “They are not prepared to change the system.”

Guilt and hell

At 82 years old, Jean-Marie, who prefers not to reveal her last name, assures that she has no personal claims. If he participated in the commission, it was because he cares “that the church put pedophiles out of the game. “

“Zero tolerance!” Asks this man who was first attacked by a family friend at “7 or 8 years old” and then by a Capuchin religious, “between 11 and 14 years old”.

He did not report these events, which he did not speak about for a long time and which he partially forgot.

Very marked by “the domain of the church through guilt, “he denounced the” mechanics “he suffered:” the secret that is installed; the comedy of consent ”. “The predator makes you a willing accomplice and possibly guilty by telling you, ‘You should have stopped me.’

These attacks took place in the 1950s in the Vendée, a region in the west of France “Very catholic”, where “all that was the awakening of sexuality in adolescent boys was a mortal sin and a sentence in hell”.

“I want the church recognize this extreme violence ”that“ ruined my childhood ”, that you assume that“ these acts are crimes more than sins ”, that you give new directions to the clergy” or that you “grant a true place to women” in your government.