Aftershocks from a sexual abuse report continued last week with the removal of the French bishops’ conference spokesperson, who fanned controversy on the issue of confessional secrecy and the primacy of French law.
Catholic daily La Croix revealed that the conference’s director of communications, Karine Dalle, who began on 1 September, was leaving her post.
The bishops said that her “trial period has not been confirmed” but she said that she had “been fired”.
This came after an independent commission estimated French clerical abuse cases since 1950 at 330,000, two-thirds by clerics.
Conference head Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort accepted the report of the commission, led by Jean-Marc Sauvé.
But he then fumbled badly by insisting the seal of the confessional was above the laws of France’s secular republic.
The report said priests who learn of abuse in Confession must report it to secular authorities.
Confessional secrecy has long been respected in French law, like that for doctors or lawyers.
The tendency in recent decades for radical imams to insist sharia trumps civil law has forced the secular state to reassert its primacy in legal affairs.
If Muslims have been called to order, Catholics had to be too.
An experienced press officer might have anticipated this political minefield and issued a bland statement letting the state avoid a confrontation with its majority faith. Instead, the archbishop proclaimed that canon law trumped French law, provoking the interior minister to rein him in.
Afterwards, both sought to calm the waters. In their statements neither the archbishop nor the priests must break the confessional seal. But then Ms Dalle went further, defending the Church’s position and complaining that anti-clericals misunderstood the issue.
She mentioned the media but politicians could not but feel this also meant them.
Even before she was fired, Archbishop Moulins-Beaufort resumed his normally balanced approach. His closing speech to the bishops’ conference on 8 November accepted full responsibility for any abuse. To date only 17 dioceses have signed protocols with local judicial authorities to report abuse priests learn of.
Since few cases come through Confession, priests can report other cases they think are serious. This is widely seen as a reasonable compromise both sides can live with, and the bishops’ conference has recommended that other dioceses adopt this policy