Remembering Régine Fays 65 years after her murder

The priest prayed over their bodies, a mother and child – his child – and her very young mother; the year was 1956, Northern France. 

“He recites a prayer to his victims before covering them with his coat. “I knew it would happen,” he says. And as people crowd around him, he isolates himself and, after having consulted a theology book, concludes: “I can't really say anything, it would be a case of excommunication. I cannot say anything about what I have learned in the secret of confession.”

A few hours later, when he was presented with the casing found at the scene, he confessed and took a knife out of his pocket. The priest of Uruffe confessed to the investigators what the whole village knew.”

“Here lies Fays, Régine killed on December 3, 1956 by the parish priest G – D at the age of 19 years.” This is the inscription on the grave of nineteen year old Régine Fays, killed in France in the middle of the last century, a young mother who bore a priest’s child.

This year, 2021, marks the sixty fifth anniversary of the death of Régine Fays, the nineteen year old girl from Uruffe, a small village in Meurthe-et-Moselle in Northern France. The young lady was pregnant at the time of her death, the father of the child, a priest, L'Abbé Desnoyers who only died just over ten years ago.

Fays was not the first to fall victim to Desnoyers, nor was her child the first offspring of Desnoyers. The errant priest however, was rumoured to have other affairs with women, one of which resulted in his transfer, when his superiors became aware of his infidelity. Reports acknowledge the existence of a child born prior to the pregnancy of Mme Fays, the mother of whom was only fifteen years of age at the time, leaving the unanswered question of the present existence of said child(ren).

The violence this priest imposed upon minors, escalated when he killed Mms Fays, along with her baby, in a particularly cruel and disturbing manner. The priest took the child from the mother’s womb, baptising it, before killing the new-born girl along with her very young mother. 

The irony of his crime is merely surpassed by his perverse cruelty.

Some stories that appeared about this crime related that the priest “found” the woman after she went missing, alluding to the cleric’s wrongful innocence.  

Desnoyers was adamant on preserving his terrible secret. His crime, the “crime” of a priest fathering a child, merited murder, he believed. At the trial, reports confirm that Desnoyers lamented: “I totally lost my mind.... And the atrocious scene that follows? [...] I cannot explain it.”

Desnoyers ahead of his sentence, turned to his judge, as if to God, lamenting … “I am a priest, I remain a priest, [and] I will make reparation as a priest. I surrender myself to you because I know that before me you hold the place of God.”

Despite Mms Fay paying the ultimate price, having committed no crime, reports confirm that people wrote to Régine's parents, in the wake of her death, praising the good priest, calling their daughter a “whore”.

“Extenuating circumstances” allowed the priest to avoid the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison in 1978 and died only eleven years ago in 2010, having lived a reclusive life in France. Desnoyers lived out his remaining years in the relative tranquillity of the Abbey of Sainte-Anne de Kergonan in Plouharnel, Morbihan. He died there on April 21, 2010. 

The motivation to preserve the good name and respectability of the church – clericalism – is alive and well today and well and truly working to silence other women and girls, much like Mms. Fays. Where Desnoyers took up a gun to preserve the pristine and brilliant sheen of social and personal acceptability, others took up the pen.

The violence imposed upon Mms Fays, still lives on in the church today. Throughout the pandemic, I was contacted by scores of people, who, with more time to think on their hands than ever before, suffered the resurfacing of hidden family secrets, priests’ children.

In my work as a qualified therapist and counsellor in the area of child sexual abuse, I have heard many distressing stories. Client confidentiality and other considerations mean I have to be very careful about relating these stories in public. However, here is a hypothetical example of the kinds of scenarios that are still taking place today.

A priest fathers a child with a woman. The child is born. The mother wishes him to acknowledge their child. He silences her by putting a gun into her mouth. This crime is reported to the authorities by a concerned third party. No action at all is taken. The safety of the woman remains in peril. She, and others like her, find themselves socially branded as “whores”, their behaviour as “scandalous”.

People such as myself continue to work hard behind the scenes to help vulnerable victims in these scenarios, all over the world.

Ensuring the safety of such people would be a lot easier if His Holiness acknowledged, specifically, this darkened area of abuse, openly and verbally; where priests and religious threaten women and girls into submission.

Mms Régine Fays paid the ultimate price, an innocent victim, and so did her infant daughter. May their souls rest in the eternal peace of God, their heavenly father, Amen.