Over 3000 Pedophiles Caught Operating in French Catholic Church
The commission's report is due to be released on Tuesday
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Almost 3,200 pedophile priests have been working in the French Catholic Church since the 1950s, according to the president of an independent commission on sexual abuse.
Jean-Marc Sauvé, ahead of the release of the commission's final report, said:
"We had to cross historical, sociological, medical, and psychiatric perspectives.
"We had to call upon skills in the area of child protection, social work, questions of abuse and also bring to bear skills in the area of theology and law."
The commission's report is due to be released on Tuesday following years of research based on police archives.
The 2,500 pages long report will try to quantify the number of offenders as well as victims.
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The report will look at "mechanisms, notably institutional and cultural ones," which allowed pedophile priests to stay in the church and offer 45 proposals.
The French Catholic Church set up the commission in 2018 in response to exploding scandals in the Catholic church.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis passed a landmark measure that made those aware of the abuse report it to their superiors.
The commission's brief was to probe allegations of child sex abuse by clerics dating back to the 1950s.
Sauvé said the commission was important to address "this secret and hideous side of our society," and an "enormous amount of work" had gone into building the report over the last 32 months.
"We worked a lot with the victims, and we did not delegate the task of listening to all the victims to research laboratories."
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"Of course, the research laboratories did some of the hearings, but we conducted a large number of hearings ourselves," Sauvé said.
"I went through a season of hell," Christian Dubreuil, a victim who was abused when he was 11 years old, testified before the commission.
"I hope you can take them out of this sort of isolation syndrome, of blindness," Dubreuil said of the French Catholic Church.
"They are still in denial, contempt, and minimize issues."
Europe 1 radio cited sources claiming the number of potential victims in the report would reach over 100,000, which is ten times higher than the previous estimate.
