“I here reaffirm the work of the Church in France so that the truth is known about the facts of sexual assault and violence (…). I call on all other institutions and organizations to do the same. We owe this to the victims”wrote, on September 16, the president of the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF), Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, in a column on Abbé Pierre published in The World. A few days earlier, he had announced the opening to journalists and researchers of the episcopal archives concerning the founding priest of Emmaus, today accused of sexual violence.
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In fact, the documents (mainly letters sent or received by prelates), which The World consulted, testify to a progressive awareness, from the 1950s, of deviant behavior on the part of Abbé Pierre – even if they are never really qualified – as well as the desire of the French episcopate to ‘avoid at all costs that they are revealed. But the archives also suggest that the secret was kept within a perimeter going beyond the ecclesial sphere.
on ” disease “, ses “numerous moral accidents” : “All this was of great concern to those responsible for Emmaüs, who did not want to see the founder return”wrote for example Jean-Marie Villot, then secretary general of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France (ancestor of the CEF), to the Archbishop of Besançon, in 1958, shortly after the internment of Abbé Pierre in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland – internment decided by mutual agreement with Emmaüs.
What exactly did those responsible for Emmaus know? At what time? The Church archives, at least those that it has been possible to consult at this stage, do not tell us this. As for those of Emmaüs, preserved at the National Archives of the World of Work in Roubaix (North), they represent approximately 330 linear meters, with, on the one hand, the personal archives of Abbé Pierre and, on the other, those of the organization, “which have been much less explored”according to Adrien Chaboche, general delegate of Emmaüs International, legatee of the two funds.
“A very big cleaning”
“The documentation there is immense, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And there are huge holes, whole months are missing”reports to the Monde the historian Axelle Brodiez-Dolino, who consulted them for her work Emmaus and Abbot Pierre (Presses de Sciences Po, 2009). She now suspects the movement’s teams of having made a mistake there. “very big housecleaning in the 1950s; everything has been methodically redacted”. Suspicions that Adrien Chaboche says he is unable to confirm or deny.
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