"The interest aroused in France by the restoration of Notre Dame is very telling," he explained to OSV News.

Identity

"In the current context, where society tends to become unstructured, Christian religious elements are still perceived by the French as a precious heritage.

"That's because they help preserve the French identity, which seems to be dissolving in a changing world.

"Our society is marked by anxiety about its future," Portier pointed out.

"When the French, and even more widely Europeans, are surveyed, they express a great deal of pessimism.

"They used to say that tomorrow would be better than today. And today, it is the other way around.

"The general feeling is that the future will be bleaker than the present," emphasised Portier.

He's known as a professor of world-renowned French political science schools such as Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Sciences Po Paris.

"Faced with this, people tend to revalue the past, and the heritage that is its legacy," he added.

"Heritage elements appear as reassuring refuges in a period of doubt, and loss of benchmarks."

It has little to do with faith, he said, however, with "little effect on religious practice, and no impact on people's moral positions, which are disconnected from those of the Church."

Nevertheless - people do not want to cut ties with the roots of their past identity, Portier pointed out.

"They are attached to their village church, and they give money to help preserve it. Today's interest in Notre Dame Cathedral is part of this attitude."

CIASE

From 2019 to 2021, Portier was a member of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church, known by its French acronym CIASE.

It was set up in 2018 by the French bishops to investigate sexual abuse committed in the Catholic Church since the 1950s.

In October 2021, CIASE published a report that indicated that 216,000 children had been abused by Catholic clergy since 1950 - a number that shocked France and the Catholic world.

The sociologist and political scientist said that establishing the commission helped rebuild the Church's trust and, in consequence, make it a more reliable institution in a society going fast down the path of "de-Christianisation."

"The work of this commission considerably accelerated the process of raising awareness of sexual abuse in the French Church, a process already underway since the late 1990s," Portier explained.

"It marked a radical turning point in dealing with abuse. Since then, bishops and religious congregations have been taking reparation and prevention measures very seriously.

They acknowledged the facts, recognised and accepted the Church's responsibility as well as their own. … My thesis today is that the French bishops are doing a good job in this area.

"In the face of abuse, the dynamic launched by the Church in France is going in the right direction," Portier told OSV News.

"At the very top of the state, decision-makers have followed this affair very closely," he said.

"For the political elites in France, Catholicism continues to be a stabilising element in the architecture of society, due to its central place in the history of the nation.

"Everyone praised the work of CIASE and the courage of the Church of France, which commissioned it," the French professor emphasised.

"Beyond the political elite, since this report there has been a return of confidence in the Catholic Church within society as a whole," Portier continued.

"This is evident in recent polls I conducted. In modern democracy, where individuals count more than institutions, society places transparency at the heart of its functioning.

"An institution that shows itself to be transparent, as the Church has done, has everything to gain.

"Today, in general, the Church is recognised for having taken matters into its own hands with courage, and for acting with determination."

Baptisms increasing

Since 1970, the Church in France has been losing 10 percent of its membership every 10 years, and today only 30 percent of French people claim to be Catholic, Portier said.

But "we now see that this figure is no longer falling. The decline is stabilising. There are even signs, not of a new rise, but of a significant increase in the number of adults asking for baptism."

Over 12,000 people, both adults and adolescents, were baptised in France on Easter.

That is a record number in the country that at the same time made abortion a constitutional right on March 4 and started a heated debate on legalising euthanasia. Read more

• Philippe Portier is a member of the French Independent Commission on sexual abuse in church.

In the flood of information and disturbing statistics published earlier this month by France's Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), too little attention has been paid to an important detail in the commission's report - an estimated 115,000 minors and vulnerable adults were sexually abused by laypeople in a church setting over the past 70 years.

They are a significant portion of the 330,000 victims abused (216,000 others by priests) between 1950-2020.

Abuse by laypeople is something CIASE has not particularly dealt with, except for a few elements that once again underline the gravity of the situation.

The report already makes it possible to define these profiles of lay abusers who, in fact, cannot claim the status of priest or religious, but exercise ecclesial missions.

They are catechists and teachers in Catholic schools. They are also leaders of chaplaincies, choirs, youth movements or scout troops and so forth.

"From these data, the first result shows that, contrary to popular belief, sexual violence in the Church is not the prerogative of only clerics, men and women religious, but lay people are, for their part, at the origin of 34.6% of assaults, or more than a third," notes the CIASE report, also known as the Sauvé Report.

"As soon as adults are in contact with minors, there is a risk, in the Catholic Church as elsewhere, of abuse of power, authority or trust leading to sexual assault," the report insists.

"It is also likely that, over time, especially with the reduction in the number of clerics and religious and the rise in responsibility for the laity, the proportion of victims of lay people in the Catholic Church will increase," it notes.

Little documentation of abuse by lay people
Since the statistical study did not include laity, there is little evidence to establish data over time.

Moreover, the strength of the Sauvé Report lies in the emphasis on the testimony of victims.

However, "only" 75 of the more than 2,000 testimonies revealed abuse committed by lay people in the church setting.

Finally, the socio-historical investigation focused on diocesan archives, which contain few documents on abuse committed by laypeople.

La Croix was confronted with this lack of information when it contacted Catholic youth centres.

While the Sauvé Report notes that 30% of abuse in the Church occurred in the context of schools or boarding schools, the general secretariat of Catholic education admits that it cannot distinguish between those committed by priests, teachers or chaplains, and those committed by laypeople.

A strong prevalence from the 1940s to 1960s

It is also known that the highest incidence of sexual violence by priests against minors in Catholic education occurred between 1940 and 1960.

The report goes on to note "a decrease in the number of sexual assaults by clergy and religious in Catholic education, due to the rapid withdrawal of clergy from these institutions".

For several years, the Sauvé Report stresses:

"there has been a general phenomenon of professionalization for professions related to childhood: catechism is now provided by laypeople (essentially women); teaching under contract in Catholic schools is controlled by the national education system; the supervision of group camps for minors (summer camps, scouting, leisure centres without accommodation) is also controlled by the State and has become professionalized via a diploma requiring training, even if it remains partly voluntary".

There are many aspects that allow for better prevention of abuse of any kind.

"In this figure of 115,000, we feel potentially involved"

One of CIASE's recommendations is that laypeople involved in Church work be given better training. It also insists on the obligation to "systematically check the criminal background of any person that the Church appoints or assigns in a habitual way with minors or vulnerable people".

During a hearing in the French senate on March 26, 2019, the leaders of the main scouting movements explained that this verification takes place in a systematic way via a teleprocedure for welcoming minors.

Nevertheless, "in this figure of 115,000, we feel potentially involved," acknowledged Armelle Toulemonde, head of the Aux Aguets commission for the Unitary Scouts of France (SUF), which intends to fight against sexual abuse within its ranks.

But, she said she is aware of only a very small number of abuse cases.

"I am frightened about the number of people who do not speak out," she admitted.

"I know of five cases, two of which were in the 1990s," Toulemonde said.

"Yet when we created Aux Aguets, we wanted to give victims a voice. We put out a call for witnesses in the press, but we got no response," she noted.

"Before the CIASE report came out, we wrote to the group leaders to invite them, if they ever received any reports, to refer people to our commission," the scouting official said.

Olivier Savignac, who was abused by a priest during his time as a scout, said it is not surprising that victims do not turn first to the movement in which they were abused.

"The first instinct is to seek help outside," said Savignac, who is now involved in the victims' group "Parler et Revivre".

"In a movement, everyone knows each other, and there may be fear of a conflict of loyalty between the person receiving the confidence and the abuser," he said.

Structures made aware of this evil that is eating away at society as a whole

This violence is not, however, a blind spot, as the various educational and support structures for young people have, for the most part, been made aware of this evil that is eating away at society as a whole.

Agnès Cerbelaud-Salagnac, spokesperson for the Scouts and Guides of France, said her organization receives "two to three calls a year" from people who wish to report old incidents.

"We take the time to listen to the person and we put him or her in contact with our legal service to see what can be done, if he or she can lodge a complaint," she said.

"When a case breaks out, it gets publicized so that other potential victims can bring attention to their situation," Cerbelaud-Salagnac pointed out.

But Savignac deplored the "protective reflex on the part of the institutions, which do not want to bring the dead bodies out of the closet, and prefer to remain within their own walls".

Nevertheless, he acknowledged that "these acts are today more rare, since safeguards have been put in place and people speak about it more freely".

In fact, when a case is brought to court, the various scouting movements now take action alongside the victim.

• Christophe Henning and Clémence Houdaille write for La Croix in France.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.