Pedocrime in the Church: Six first victims received financial compensation

The Fund for the relief and fight against abuse of minors in the Catholic Church (Selam) has paid six financial reparations to victims of pedocrime, its president told AFP on Sunday.

"We had a board of directors which followed and decided for (...) six situations that the Inirr had transmitted", declared Gilles Vermot-Desroches, confirming information from the JDD.

The Selam, created in 2021 by the episcopate, is the structure that pays any financial reparations studied initially by another organization, the Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation (Inirr).

On June 1, the president of Inirr, Marie Derain de Vaucresson, had told the press that 736 people who had been victims of priests or lay people in various Church places (excluding congregations) had contacted this organization since mid- January, date of collection of the first files.

She had specified that the Inirr would have, in June, ruled on 10 files, before transmission to Selam. She had mentioned amounts of 8.000, 10.000 or 21.000 euros.

Mr. Vermot-Desroches did not give the amounts of the first six installments.

For victims seeking financial reparation, the Inirr has set up a system comprising a "gradation scale" along three axes (seriousness of the facts, seriousness of the "failures of the Church", seriousness of the consequences), each ranging from 1 to 10. The repair does not include a “floor” threshold, but can go up to the “maximum amount” of “60.000 euros”.

As of June 1, several groups of victims had regretted the slowness at which, according to them, the files are advancing, considering too few people compensated, six months after the filing of the first requests.

"The implementation process may appear long for people who have been waiting for a long time," said Mr. Vermot-Desroches on Sunday, stressing that "about six months after the conclusions of the Sauvé report, which revealed the extent of the phenomenon of pedocrime, “we made the first payments”.

The Selam has also decided to "fully finance" the first year of a university degree (DU) set up at the start of the school year by the Catholic Institute of Paris to better train people from the Church in the prevention and fight against abuses.

The president of Selam said in January that he had collected 20 million euros for his fund: it is "13 million euros in actual donations (mainly contributions from dioceses and bishops) and seven million pledges". , he said on Sunday.

The Editorial Board (with AFP)

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