French bishops kneel in show of penance over Catholic church’s role in child abuse
Senior members of France’s Roman Catholic hierarchy knelt in a show of penance at the shrine of Lourdes on Saturday, a day after bishops accepted the church’s responsibility for decades of child abuse, The Guardian reported.
But some of the survivors of the abuse – and lay members supporting them – said they were still waiting for details of compensation and of a comprehensive reform of the church.
In Lourdes, a place of pilgrimage for Christians, roughly 120 archbishops, bishops and laymen gathered at the unveiling of a photo showing a sculpture representing the head of a weeping child.
At the request of the victims, the clerics did not wear their religious clothing for the ceremony.
The wall featuring the photograph will serve as a “place of memory” for the victims. The photo itself was taken by one of the victims of abuse, and the suffering he had endured was detailed in a passage read out by another survivor.
Just a day earlier, after a vote at their annual conference, France’s bishops finally formally accepted that the Catholic church bore an “institutional responsibility” in the many thousands of child abuse cases.
The abuse, stretching back to the 1950s and affecting at least 216,000 minors, was detailed in an independent report released a month ago, which spoke of the “veil of silence” cast over the scandal.