Requests for adult baptisms have increased in France for the past ten years. In a report released just before Easter, representatives from the French bishops' conference pointed out that the trend is present in almost all of the dioceses in France.

According to the report, 7,135 adults were to receive the sacrament of baptism during the Easter Vigil, totalling 31% more than in 2023. While in 2023, 23% of newly baptized were between the ages of 18 and 25, that number had risen to 36% in 2024.

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France is the homeland of St Joan of Arc and St Louis.

The significance of the decline has sociology of religion expert Guillaume Cuchet suggesting that in a few decades time it could be overtaken by Islam, evangelical Protestantism and, above all, by people with no religion at all.

Cuchet believes this trend may also lead to a more traditional and observant approach among minority Catholics.

The survey, released in April 2023 by the Insee Trajectories and Origins survey (Téo 2), shows that only 25% of French people aged 18-59 declared themselves as Catholic in 2020, compared to 43% in 2008.

Those with no religion reportedly increased from 45% to 53%, and those identifying as Islam increased by 37% over the same period.

Sociologist Yann Raison du Cleuziou argues that the decline of Catholicism is mathematically self-evident based on the crossover between the younger Catholic and Muslim generations.

The generational reproduction rate for Islam is much higher than for Catholics, indicating a stronger transmission of religious values within Muslim families.

The rate of children born to Muslim families in France is 24% higher than Catholics and 22% higher than evangelical Protestants.

Migration to France has also shaped the religious landscape, with Islam and evangelical movements on the rise.

However, experts agree that the decline in Catholic religious practice and its transmission within families dates back to the mid-1960s.

Observers attribute the decline of religious practice to the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent changes in pastoral care.

The impending release of a potentially devastating report about sexual abuse allegations at France's Community of St John has directed renewed attention towards the country's fragile state of the Church. There are fears the release of the report could further increase the decline of Catholicism in France.

Concluding its findings, the report suggested that "Jewish and Muslim families transmit their religion better than Catholic families," implying that a potential solution to the diminishing Catholic faith lies in placing greater emphasis on religious education and formation.

Sources

National Catholic Register

Aleteia

Luc Ravel, the Archbishop of Strasbourg, announced his resignation on April 20. However, he gave no reason for his resignation.

"Peace being the supreme good (...), I have presented my resignation to the Holy Father, for whom I pray every day", he said.

Ravel, 65, resigned from his position, despite being a decade away from the customary retirement age for diocesan bishops.

Archbishop Ravel is known for being heavy-handed and authoritarian and for his commitment to fighting against sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

His approach to leadership had increasingly isolated him from his priests and the Catholic community of Alsace.

The Catholic community of Alsace had long been calling for his resignation and an online petition for this attracted more than a thousand signatures.

As a new archbishop, Ravel did not take the time to meet his priests, angering a large segment of the clergy.

According to reports, he spent too much time in his native Paris and relied more on his secretary than his closest associates.

During Holy Week, Archbishop Ravel did not celebrate the Chrism Mass with the archdiocese priests. He thereby avoided confrontation with demonstrators who were demanding his removal. But his absence aggravated the complaints of priests who said he spent little time with his clergy.

Vatican investigated Archbishop Ravel

The Vatican investigated Archbishop Ravel's governance in June 2022.

Their focus was a number of complaints about his authoritarian approach.

Bishop Stanislas Lalanne of Pontoise and Archbishop Joël Mercier, former secretary of the Dicastery for the Clergy, conducted the investigation.

The report has never been released.

The former prefect for the Dicastery for Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, summoned Ravel to Rome for a meeting, during which he was asked to resign and send a letter to the French president, as required by the concordat.

However, the resignation letter never materialised, leading to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Pope's Secretary of State, summoning Ravel to Rome again.

This time, the Archbishop cited health reasons for not attending.

The Holy See is expected to transfer Archbishop Ravel to a titular diocese, as was done with Bishop Jacques Gaillot in 1995. Titular sees are usually reserved for bishops who are not diocesan ordinaries, and the move does not require the approval of the French president.

Sources

La Croix International

The Pillar

Catholic Culture

"We will not take money from the Church's yearly parish contributions, we will not use donations that the faithful make to us for [our missions]", Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the Bishops' Conference of France (CEF) announced on Monday.

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in Church (ICSA) urged the Church to pay survivors with its own assets instead of relying on donations from parishioners. They insisted each person be compensated individually and said the reparations should be studied case by case.

Paying reparations to survivors without counting on donations from parishioners will cause the French Church significant financial stress.

The Catholic Church has been robbed of its assets twice in French history.

The first occasion was during the French Revolution in 1789. The second instance occurred in 1905, following a law separating the Church and state was instituted.

That means most churches belong to and are not owned and maintained by the Church but by local municipalities. And unlike most other European countries, the Church in France doesn't receive any state subsidies.

"The entirety of the Church's income comes from donations. We live off donations," deputy secretary-general and director of communications at the CEF Karine Dalle told FRANCE 24.

The total sum the French church needs to compensate victims is not yet defined, but it will be immense. Moreover, as other survivors come forward, the compensation is expected to grow.

"The 330,000 victims in the report are a statistic for now. We still don't have their names. We don't know who they are," Dalle said.

"We're completely in the dark."

It will be up to the Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation (INIRR), headed by lawyer Marie Derain de Vaucresson, to determine the exact amount allocated to each survivor.

"We will ensure that no one is left behind," Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort told reporters after the annual meeting of bishops held last week.

In October, the ICSA released a monumental report unveiling the extent of child sexual abuse that has taken place in the hands of the French Catholic Church.

Part of the report included recommendations on how the Church should compensate the survivors.

Sources

• France24
• New York Times

In a statement on Friday, the conference said the French Catholic Church bears "institutional responsibility" for the thousands of child abuse cases documented in a report released in October.

"This responsibility implies a duty to provide justice and reparation," Moulins-Beaufort said.

He made the comments at the conference's annual meeting following a vote by the bishops.

In October, an independent commission published findings on child sex abuse in France's Catholic Church between 1950 and 2020.

The 2,500-page document details how an estimated 3,000 child abusers worked in the Catholic Church in France over seven decades. Two-thirds of the abusers were priests.

There were an estimated 216,000 victims of sexual abuse. The report found that the "vast majority" of victims were young boys from various social backgrounds.

Abuse victims had been invited to join the meeting, but many declined. Around 100 laypeople also received invitations to attend, but many couldn't due to the late notice.

"We had to clear our calendars at the last minute," said Dominique Quinio, president of the French Social Weeks. She is also a member of the steering committee of "Promesses d'Eglise", a network of reform-minded Catholic groups.

The invitations were sent out in the context of the recently published report on Church sexual abuse in France. The invitations were for the lay Catholics to join the bishops in various working groups, rather than address them as an entire body in general assembly.

But many of these laypersons said on the eve of the meeting that they wanted to help the prelates understand their feelings of "anger" at the findings by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE).

"There is a lot of anger, especially among the pillars of the Church," said Sylvie Bukhari, president of CCFD-Terre Solidaire and a member of Promesses d'Église.

Sabine Adrien, a member of Altercathos, said, "In the wake of the CIASE report, I was torn between sadness and hope".

"But this hope was very quickly dashed by statements from bishops, which made me very angry. Especially so, since the commission also noted very recent cases of mismanagement," Adrien admitted.

According to the document, two bishops, one in 2019 and the other in 2020, arranged a rapid departure abroad for two Fidei Donum priests accused of sexual abuse.

"The laity did not wait to be invited to Lourdes to give warnings and express their discontent," emphasized Arnaud Bouthéon, who is involved in several ecclesial movements and structures.

"The laity can be given more responsibility!" he insisted.

"Share, delegate and surround yourself with more men and women," is the message Dominique Quinio intends to tell the bishops.

But many of the lay people invited to the CEF plenary fear the bishops will not really listen to them. They question that the laity are there just for show.

"I wonder about the process. Is everything already locked in place?" one of them wondered.

"I hope we don't just serve as a decoration," warned another.

Sources

• Deutsche Welle
• La Croix International
• CathNews New Zealand

It is not only the hierarchy that is now doing so, but all of France, Catholic and otherwise. Indeed, the world has taken shocked notice.

The Sauvé Report, an investigation commissioned by the French bishops in 2018 in the wake of a series of clerical sex abuse scandals, was issued on Oct. 5.

The tremors of disbelief, outrage and horror continue to reverberate.

The statistical tally is staggering: 216,000 people sexually abused by clerics since 1950, with an additional 114,000 abused by laypeople in ecclesiastical service. The number of accused priests is conservatively estimated at 3,000.

Jean-Marc Sauvé, a retired senior civil servant, judge and practising Catholic, berated the church for showing a "profound and total, even cruel, indifference to the victims," and acknowledged publicly that he sought out psychological help after listening to the experiences of some of the survivors.

His report was comprehensive, drawing on numerous experts in jurisprudence, history, theology, psychology and sociology.

More than 6,000 victims were canvassed for their input or interviewed.

Working closely with various polling bodies, Mr Sauvé and his commissioners took several years to do their work and then presented their findings to a church still capable of shock.

In commenting in La Croix International, the leading French Catholic publication, Jesuit theologian and university rector Ḗtienne Grieu anguished: "How is it that we did not dare to say out loud what we were witnessing in secret? And how is that we did not give credit to those who had the courage to alert us?"

Answering these questions has been a global dilemma for many Catholics.

How many times have we been in this place?

How many commissions and reports before Mr Sauvé's have asked the same things, probed similar pathologies, excoriated bishops for not exercising a Gospel-centered pastoral oversight by privileging errant clerics over suffering victims, and seeking, often vainly, to change the structures that enable such abuse to occur?

Before France, there was Germany, England and Wales, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Australia, Chile and on it goes. Before the Sauvé Commission Report there was the Winter (Canada), the Ryan (Ireland), the Nolan (England) and numerous others.

And the number of films (Fall), documentaries (Deliver Us from Evil), plays (Doubt), novels (The Bishop's Man) and scholarly studies (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) are legion.

The universally agreed upon diagnosis is multi-layered:

• a romanticized conception of priesthood that removed the priest from regular human commerce;
• a rampant clericalism that ensured a power imbalance that facilitated clerical predation;
• the subordination of victim needs to the higher priority of maintaining the church's good name;
• the failure of seminaries to nurture mature psychosexual growth.

For those Catholics who call out for meaningful and transparent reform - and their number is growing by the minute - patience for this often Sisyphean undertaking has been replaced by a crushing demoralization.

And it isn't just the laity who are demoralized. Continue reading

• Michael W. Higgins is principal/president of St. Mark's and Corpus Christi Colleges, University of British Columbia, Senior Fellow of Massey College, and co-author of Suffer the Children unto Me: An Open Inquiry into the Clerical Sex Abuse Crisis.

The "Appeal for a Renewed and Trustworthy Church", was posted on Monday. It is an online petition calling for the en masse resignation of the country's bishops.

"As a sign of hope and renewal, we ask for the collective resignation of all the bishops in office.

"It is the only gesture commensurate with the catastrophe and the loss of confidence in which we find ourselves," says the petition website.

"Faced with this bankruptcy, the resignation of the bishops is the only honourable solution," said Anne Soupa, a theologian and married mother of four adult children who "applied" last year to become Archbishop of Lyon.

Soupa is one of three leading reform-minded Catholics in France behind the drive.

The other two are François Devaux, co-founder of the abuse victims' group "La Parole Libérée", and Christine Pedotti, editorial director of the progressive Catholic magazine Témoignage Chrétien.

During its first 24 hours online, the appeal/petition had gathered nearly 3,200 signatures.

It comes six days after the October 5 publication of the damaging report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE).

Also known as the Sauvé Report, the massive document revealed that some 330,000 children and adolescents were victims of sexual violence in the Church in France between 1950 and 2020.

"In any other association or company, resignation would have been demanded even for something 100 times less damaging. All the leaders would have had to resign," said Soupa.

"Undoubtedly, not all French bishops have covered up crimes. But the very structure of the Catholic hierarchy assumes continuity and solidarity between each bishop and his predecessor. As such, though not all are guilty, all are responsible," says the online petition.

To support their demand, the three signatories point to a "precedent" in the Catholic Church.

In 2018, the group resignation of 34 Chilean bishops occurred after they were directly challenged by Pope Francis for mishandling sexual abuse cases. The pope eventually accepted the resignation of seven of them.

Pedotti, Soupa and Devaux have received the support of Reverend Pierre Vignon, an expert on tackling sexual abuse in the Church.

"What would have had panache and would have made an impression would have been to collectively resign immediately," said Vignon. He is a priest who is known to be a straight-shooter and a bit of a maverick.

"They (the bishops) can still do that at their next plenary assembly in Lourdes in November," he said.

Sources

• La Croix International
• The Economist

Francis first thoughts were for the victims.

It is "with a deep sadness for their wounds and gratitude for their courage in coming forward," the Vatican said in a statement.

"To the victims, I wish to express my sadness and my pain for the traumas they have endured and my shame, our shame, my shame that for so long the Church has been incapable of putting this at the centre of its concerns, assuring them of my prayers."

"The Catholic Church's inability to make victims of abuse their top concern is a cause for intense shame," Francis said.

"Our shame. My shame", he said.

Assuring victims of his prayers, the pope asked everyone at his general audience in the Vatican's Paul VI hall to pray with him: "To you, Lord, the glory; to us, the shame. This is the moment of shame."

He invited the nation's Catholics to take on their responsibility for guaranteeing that "the church be a safe home for everyone."

Francis' comments come after the release of an independent report on sexual abuse.

The head of the inquiry said there were at least 2,900-3,200 abusers and a third of them laypeople.

He accused the Church of showing a "cruel indifference towards the victims".

François Devaux, who is also the founder of the victims' association La Parole Libérée said there had been a "betrayal of trust, betrayal of morale, betrayal of children".

The report marks a turning point in France's history, he said: "You have finally given institutional recognition to victims of all the Church's responsibility - something that bishops and the Pope have not yet been prepared to do."

The report also said, "more than a third of sexual assaults within the French Catholic Church were committed, not by clergy or monks, but by laypeople."

It noted the number of abused children could rise to 330,000, when taking into account abuses committed by lay members of the Church in France, such as teachers at Catholic schools.

A report summary notes it draws a picture of "sexual violence that decreased over time but is still present; that it is based on numerous clearly identified traits of a systemic nature. The trauma suffered by the victims is compounded by the perpetrator's standing,".

"In all the testimonials … the first cry is for justice.

"In other words, before proclaiming ‘it must never happen again,' the ‘it' has to be recognized, acknowledged, and described, those responsible for ‘it' need to be designated and, in as far as is possible, reparation for ‘its' consequences need to be found.

'It is not enough for the church to claim awareness, albeit too late in the day. Or to claim that the past is the past and that for today's and tomorrow's children and vulnerable persons the same mistakes will not be repeated."

"The way in which victims spoke out or broke their silence, as they told the commission of their experiences, shows just how long and obstacle-strewn this process is and how it is all too rarely properly taken into account or followed up by the entourage or institution," it said.

Source

• BBC
• Catholic Review
• America Magazine
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: CNN