The fight of three young women victims of a Lazarist priest

One Thursday evening, at the end of April 2023, several facilitators supervising high school students are resting after a busy day during a pilgrimage to Lourdes (Hautes-Pyrénées). Léa (names have been changed) is part of the group. Little by little, the discussion turns to sexual violence in the Church. The young woman, now 25 years old and who says she ” given [sa] life in the Church”, for which she still works, after studying theology and a canonical baccalaureate, masters the subject: during her studies, she worked for a year on the report of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (Ciase) of 2021. But after a few minutes, her hands start to shake, the flashes come back to her, she moves aside, can no longer feel her legs, has a panic attack. A relative, the group leader, comes to inquire about her condition. Then, for the first time, Léa tells someone what she experienced six years earlier.

Like two other victims, The World collected the testimonies, the young woman accuses Father Vincent G., a Lazarist priest (a congregation founded by Saint Vincent de Paul, particularly committed to the evangelization of the poor), of sexual assault. For Léa, the facts date back to 2017, when she was barely 18 years old, and are now prescribed. Contacted, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office confirms what “two complaints concerning three victims of sexual assault” were transmitted to him, which he relinquished in favor of the “public prosecutor of the domicile of the alleged perpetrator, the prosecutor of the Dax judicial court”. The latter prefers not to comment at this stage.

The three women interviewed by The World, who have long believed they were alone, regret the opaque management of their stories by the Church. According to them, the ecclesiastical institution let the priest do what he wanted and did not impose adequate sanctions, while the first internal complaints date back to the early 2000s. According to the website of the Congregation of the Mission (the Lazarists), Vincent G., now 60 years old, was “mainly on a mission with adolescents” and plays the role of facilitator “with young travelers for the time of pilgrimages”. The man currently resides at the Berceau church in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, near Dax (Landes). A place of passage for many pilgrims, several observers are surprised. For his part, Mr.^gr Nicolas Souchu, bishop of the diocese of Aire-et-Dax, assures that Father G. “no longer has a mission in the diocese”.

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