French Disconnect

The philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” One wonders if Guy de Kerimel, archbishop of Toulouse, remembers the past, for he seems committed to repeating it.

Toulouse is a city in southern France, a nation that’s grappling with the fallout from a report released this summer that reveals dark, deadly, and even demonic aspects of its past. The report is the result of a five-month inquiry into the prevalence of violence against students in the nation’s education system. Commissioned by the French Parliament, it examines over 270 schools, but it has a heavy focus on Catholic institutions under state contract, especially those with boarding programs. Commission president Fatiha Keloua Hachi described the investigation as a “deep dive into the unthinkable.”

The commission was established following revelations of abuse at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a Catholic boarding school in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The abuse is alleged to have spanned several decades, from the 1950s to the 2010s, during which priests, teachers, and staff subjected the underage students in their charge to serious physical and sexual abuse. The victims described acts of “unprecedented severity” and “absolute sadism,” and French lawmakers called the school a “textbook example” of the state’s structural dysfunction.

Alain Esquerre, 53, a former student, wrote a book about his experiences at the school titled The Silence of Bétharram, released this spring. Poor grades got him four slaps in the face and a kick in the stomach while lying on the office floor of the “prefect of discipline.” He recounts having suffered beatings, near starvation, stinging nettles rubbed on bare legs (to punish tardiness), and injections from water-filled syringes under the skin that caused excruciating blisters. Another student contracted hypothermia after being forced to stand outside half-naked. Two others were slapped so hard their eardrums shattered. Others recalled incidents of voyeurism, molestation, and rape. According to one former student, “Bétharram was an ideal haven for pedophiles” — a particularly sadistic brand of pedophile.

This February the school’s “prefect of discipline,” Damien Saget, was one of three former employees taken into custody over allegations of aggravated rape, aggravated sexual assault, and aggravated violence. Despite the numerous accusations against him, Saget was released because the statute of limitation had expired. He’s a free man. So, too, is another of the accused, and for the same reason. The third has been indicted for “rape by a person in authority” and is awaiting trial.

In another thwarting of justice, a former principal at Bétharram, Fr. Pierre Silviet-Carricart, was arrested in 1998 and indicted for repeatedly raping a ten-year-old male student — once on the morning of the boy’s father’s funeral. The case against the priest was closed after Silviet-Carricart committed suicide in 2000. Despite the allegations — he’s the subject of 24 complaints of physical and sexual assault — and the taking of his life by his own hand, he was buried on school grounds.

As we’ve come to expect, these and other horrors were perpetrated under a cone of official silence. But in this case, the coverup extends all the way to the top of the French political hierarchy. Among those implicated is current French prime minister François Bayrou, who sent three of his own children to Bétharram. His wife, who attended Fr. Silviet-Carricart’s funeral, taught catechism there. The judge who oversaw the Silviet-Carricart case has admitted, decades later, that Bayrou, then Minister of National Education, had pleaded with him in favor of both the school, the reputation of which he was eager to protect, and the accused priest, whom he described as an “honest man.”

If this isn’t an argument for the separation of Church and state, I don’t know what is.

The findings of the French Parliament follow an earlier, equally damning inquiry, released in October 2021: a 2,500-page report, commissioned by the French bishops, on the history of clerical sexual abuse over the past seven decades. The exhaustive inquiry found that since 1950, priests in France had sexually abused some 216,000 children — an astronomical figure. The number of victims rises to around 330,000 when abuse committed by lay members of the Church, such as parish schoolteachers, is taken into account. Approximately 3,000 child-abusers — two-thirds of them priests — worked in the French Church over the past 70 years. The independent commission described the abuse as “systemic.”

These two reports expose the extraordinary, even extreme extent of child abuse by French Catholic priests and personnel. And yet there are those who still wonder why Catholicism is dying in France, the erstwhile “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

As bad as all this is, you might be asking yourself, what does it have to do with the archbishop of Toulouse?

It was against this backdrop of unadulterated evil that de Kerimel appointed Dominique Spina as his archdiocesan chancellor this summer. Why is this noteworthy? In 2006 Fr. Spina was sentenced to five years in prison for multiple counts of raping a teenage boy in the 1990s — while serving as a chaplain at a school in the city of Bayonne, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. That school? Notre-Dame de Bétharram. Nota bene: Spina wasn’t merely accused of child rape; he was convicted of it and did time for it. The protection, and even promotion, of the school’s pederasts by those in positions of authority proceeds apace.

Ah, but according to Archbishop de Kerimel, Fr. Spina’s assignment can “in no way be understood or presented as a promotion.” Why not? Because Spina is and remains a “man of the shadows,” he said (using a rather unfortunate expression), and has “no leading role” in the archdiocese. That’s a stretch, to say the least. Fr. Spina had spent the previous years as vice-chancellor. I could be wrong, but doesn’t it militate against reason to say that going from vice-chancellor to chancellor is not a step up the career ladder? Whom does the archbishop think he’s fooling?

He’s not fooling his flock, who (of course) received with alarm news of the promotion (yes, let’s call it that) of a convicted rapist to chancellor. In the face of public scrutiny, de Kerimel did what other prelates before him have done: He defended his decision by appealing to higher ideals and a higher authority and asking rhetorical questions.

“Is it possible to show mercy to a priest who sinned gravely 30 years ago, and who has since demonstrated self-sacrifice and integrity in his service and his relationship with his superiors and fellow priests?” the archbishop wondered aloud. “Mercy is not opposed to justice, but it goes further. If there is no mercy, we are most unfortunate, for there is no salvation possible for any of us. Not to show mercy is to lock the abuser into a social death; it is to re-establish a form of the death penalty.”

So, failure to promote a child rapist to the position of chancellor is to consign him to a social death — and it puts the whole economy of salvation at risk? Who knew!

De Kerimel’s use of fashionable ecclesial buzzwords — social death and mercy, favorites of Pope Francis — is impressive. Not to go unnoticed: It was during Francis’s pontificate that Catholic teaching on the death penalty was revised. As such, it’s no surprise de Kerimel would appeal to the late Pope to justify his move. “Francis said that God is Mercy, that’s his Name,” the archbishop intoned. “And we Christians are witnesses to God’s mercy.”

If you argue against his handling of archdiocesan personnel, de Kerimel is saying, you’re arguing against God Himself.

The archbishop has shown himself to be a sophist of the first order.

Perhaps in his willful forgetting of the past, de Kerimel has also forgotten that Pope Francis once said this:

Young people are scandalized by the hypocrisy of adults. They are scandalized by incoherence, they are scandalized by corruption, and into this [scandal] of corruption [comes] sexual abuse…. But even if it was just one priest who abused a boy or a girl, this is atrocious, because that man was chosen by God…. In the Church it is the most scandalous because [the Church] should bring children to God and not destroy them. (in-flight press conference, Sept. 15, 2018)

De Kerimel worries about Spina’s “social death.” What about the child whose life and faith the priest most assuredly destroyed? This is the hypocrisy and incoherence that scandalizes young people — not to mention us old heads. This type of abuse is, as the late Pope said, atrocious, the definition of which is “extremely evil.”

It’s difficult to shake the sense that pederasts and other perverts are — still — a protected class in the Church.

As for corruption, abuse, and scandal, these are words certain prelates would prefer to suppress and cover over with a mushily defined mercy. That’s because these words signify an ongoing theme in the Catholic Church for over two decades now, a vast series of crimes to which many of those same prelates are accessories.

Archbishop de Kerimel noted that media coverage of l’affaire Spina cited a provision in canon law that chancellors must be “of unimpaired reputation and above all suspicion.” Yeah, that’s a bit of a botheration. But de Kerimel had a response at the ready: “We believe, as Christian faith and simple humanity invite us to do, that a person’s conversion is possible.”

Yes, we Catholics believe in mercy, forgiveness, and conversion. But just as mercy is not opposed to justice, neither does it override justice — even for the converted. Timothy Cardinal Dolan, when he was archbishop of Milwaukee, said it best when talking about forgiving pederast priests. “The Church forgives the priest, as long as he’s asked for forgiveness,” he said. “Yet — and here’s the tough part — while we forgive him, love him and still want to help him, we believe we cannot permit him to minister any longer” — or to occupy major administrative posts. “There is a big difference between forgiveness and permissiveness. What it means is that, tragically, sin has severe consequences.” One of those consequences should be the closing of opportunities for career advancement.

A glass ceiling for pederast priests? Yes!

At least one French archbishop knows this — and hasn’t been afraid to say so publicly. Archbishop Hervé Giraud of the Diocese of Viviers criticized de Kerimel’s promotion of Fr. Spina, calling it “unacceptable and untenable.” Giraud asked, “Who should show mercy? I don’t think a bishop can show mercy without taking into account the victims…. It’s not simple because we must also look after the priest’s future, but there are many other ways to open up a path in life for him.” One of those time-honored paths is a hidden life of prayer and penance.

Thankfully, there are a few sensible princes in the Church, one being Hervé Giraud. But they are outnumbered — to a vast degree — by the victims of the pederast priests their more plentiful fellows feel compelled to protect and, yes, promote. It’s astounding, and not a little discouraging, that after more than 20 years, the clerical sex-abuse scandal keeps repeating itself.

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