The thought of passing by the psychoanalysis practice situated on the Place de la Nation, a huge square in south-east Paris, filled Fabien (whose real name is withheld here) with anguish to the point that he left the city to begin a new life elsewhere. “At the end of the therapy, I was blocked,” he recalled. “I can’t ride a bike anymore. I had the impression that my body was consuming itself and I regularly took cold showers.”
Fabien, in his early 40s, today lives in the Rhône-Alpes département (county) in south-east France. In a lengthy interview with Mediapart, he described how for 14 years, up until 2011, he was a patient of Monseigneur Tony Anatrella, a priest of the Diocese of Paris, a ‘consultor’ with the Vatican, a controversial psychoanalyst and personality who proclaims himself to be a “specialist in social psychiatry”. Fabien said he was subjected to a perverse therapy which involved a progressive path from acts of rubbing his body - “on top of clothing or on the skin,” he recalled – and eventually to masturbation.
His account appears certain to re-open a judicial investigation that was closed, with no further action taken, in 2007. On April 29th, French public broadcaster France 3 revealed that two other men, both former pupils of the Lycée Arago, have announced their intention to lodge a formal complaint against the priest for sexual harassment. Their complaint concerns alleged events that took place when Anatrella was chaplain at the school, also situated on the Place de la Nation.
Meanwhile, Dominican priest Philippe Lefebvre, who teaches theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, has informed Mediapart that he is in contact with another alleged victim of Anatrella’s, with whom he was once a patient.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Anatrella, 75, is a ‘consultor’ for two Vatican bodies, the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care (which centres on health care matters). A teacher with the prestigious Collège des Bernardins in Paris, Antatrella wields significant influence within the Catholic Church in Rome and Paris and his theories about adolescence and conservative views about homosexuality are regularly cited.
In 2006, the Paris public prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation into the claims of three young male adults who denounced sexual abuse they allegedly suffered from Anatrella while patients of his. Only one of the three lodged an official complaint against the priest. In September 2007, the investigation was closed after it was decided that the events described by two of the men related to a period that was covered by prescription laws - when the period of time that has elapsed between when an alleged crime took place and the opening of an investigation is more than ten years – while, in the case of the third, there was insufficient proof of a crime. At the time the national press in France reported the cases, and one of the three alleged victims gave a lengthy interview to Golias, a left-wing Catholic magazine.
Despite the coverage, the French Catholic Church did not open an internal investigation into the allegations against Tony Antatrella.
Mediapart has gained access to several documents that show that the Paris archdiocese was alerted in 2001 by an alleged victim of Anatrella’s about his sexual abuse. In 2007, before the closure of the preliminary investigation led by the Paris public prosecutor’s office, that same person again raised his allegations against Anatrella in letters sent by recorded delivery to eight bishops, including those of Paris, Bordeaux and Lorraine. Subsequently, on September 25th 2007, the Paris archdiocese’s ecclesiastic judge decided that given the recent closure of the public prosecutor’s investigation, there was no reason to open a “canonical procedure”.
Last week, a Paris priest met with the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois to discuss the two new cases leveled against Anatrella by the former pupils of the Lycée Arago. The priest has, at the time this article is published, received no formal reaction from Vingt-Trois. “I had the impression that he was not interested,” said the priest, whose name is withheld.
Contacted by Mediapart, a spokesperson for the Paris diocese said “if a person considers themselves to have been victim of acts that constitute a crime, they are incited to lodge a complaint and take their case to the judicial authorities”. The spokesperson added that the diocese “has no knowledge of complaints against father Anatrella”.
As for the Paris ecclesiastic court, its president, Claude Petit Delmas, said no investigation had been opened. “Anonymous letters [mean] you cannot contact people in return,” he said. “They were rumours.”
Also contacted by Mediapart, neither the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nor the Vatican’s ambassador to Paris (who we were told was traveling abroad) agreed to comment on the issue.
Tony Anatrella, contacted via an assistant, told Mediapart that he would not “at present” answer questions from the press.
'He was going to deliver me from homosexuality'
It was with the creation of the association La Parole Libérée (loosely,“liberated expression”), which was first set up to help victims of paedophile acts by priests, that Fabien came forward over his alleged abuse at the hands of Anatrella. In the detailed account he gave to Mediapart, he said it was in June 1997, upon the recommendation of a Paris priest, that he first visited the psychoanalysis practice on the Place de la Nation. He was to follow therapy by Anatrella over the next 14 years.
Fabien recalled that it was in the early the 2000s that Anatrella first shocked him, with a kiss that he was unable to understand. From there, said Fabien, the therapy took on a physical aspect, with a progressive escalation from touching, to massages and ultimately mutual masturbation. This was explained as targeting a problem of Fabien’s supposed lack of paternal affection. “According to what he said, being in lack of a father, I had to reinforce my masculinity, and the perception therefore of my masculine sex,” said Fabien. “He invited me to speak about it, to imagine sexual situations, and sexual exchanges with another man. Then, one day, he asked me if I imagined concretising what I said. If I wished to put it into action, or if I preferred keeping it to conversation.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Between 2010 and 2011 there were six, perhaps seven, special consultations, Fabien recalled, in which he and Anatrella engaged in touching and sexual acts. “They were consultations which I didn’t pay for, and which lasted one hour instead of half an hour, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning when his assistant wasn’t there,” said Fabien. After each session of touching there would follow an analysis of what Fabien felt.
Troubled by the events, Fabien said he asked Anatrella to end the physical contact. In March 2011, he learnt of the earlier complaints against Anatrella made by former patients. He sent a last cheque to Anatrella in June 2011 and ended the consultations. The turn of events was brutal and traumatizing and he wanted to escape Paris. But after moving to the provinces, he said he remains haunted by the sexual abuse, to the point of being unable to build a normal affective relationship.
Mediapart also met with one of the three men who alleged they had been sexually abused by Anatrella in the 2006-2007 investigation by the Paris public prosecutor’s office. In the case of Eric (real name withheld), the alleged events fell under the prescription rule.
Eric, a former seminarian and now a healthcare assistant in the provinces, followed four years of consultations with the priest-come-psychoanalyst beginning in 1989. “At first I didn’t immediately realize,” he said. “I’m in a non-acceptation of my homosexuality because it wasn’t tolerated in the seminar [Catholic higher education school for training priests]. The attitude of Tony Anatrella was to say that I’m not really homosexual. That his practices will liberate me. He was my saviour. He was going to deliver me from homosexuality. I was going to at last find a wife, be able to found a family.”
What he said were “corporal” sessions started soon after. These began as nude massages, then mutual touching began, followed by masturbation and fellatio. It was the first time he had ejaculated in the presence of an adult and Eric said he felt feelings of disgust and unease. “We alternated the corporal consultations and the consultations where we discussed. It was the same price,” he said. “To my mind, psychotherapy should have liberated speech, and me, I was locked up within my secret.”
In 1993, after four years of Anatrella’s “corporal therapy”, Eric decided to leave Paris and the seminar and settled in the provinces where he took up training to become a stonecutter. That was when he consulted another psychotherapist, and he soon recounted his experiences with Anatrella. With Eric’s permission, the psychotherapist, Jean-Dominique Vauthier agreed to speak to Mediapart. “At the end of half an hour, he told me that he was raped by his therapist,” recalled Vauthier. “It was a big surprise. I said to myself that it was the most serious fault a therapist can commit, because the patient projects a paternal image onto his therapist. So if there is touching, there’s betrayal. It is a symbolic incest, as if a father raped his son.”
The psychologist said he did not doubt the veracity of Eric’s story. “My personal conviction,” said Vauthier, “is that I don’t think Eric could have invented all that. He thinks of it night and day. He is so distraught.”
In February 2001, Eric decided to contact the late cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger who was then Archbishop of Paris. In a letter he sent to Lustiger and which Mediapart has seen, he wrote: “I have had the occasion of living a particularly damaging relationship with a priest of the diocese of Paris. The events concern his abuse of confidence, fraud and sexual abuse.”
Lustiger agreed to meet Eric, but there was no follow up to their encounter.
'No psychologist knows him'
It was in 2006 that the case finally became the subject of a judicial investigation. Eric and two other men gave their accounts of abuse by Anatrella, but only one of the other two lodged a formal complaint. “I was a consenting adult and it dated back more than ten years,” explained Eric. I don’t see how I could have lodged a complaint.” The prescription law in France that rules that a crime alleged to have taken place more than ten years before the opening of an investigation cannot be prosecuted was the reason the public prosecutor’s office threw out the case of Eric and one of the other two alleged victims. “I had a small salary as a healthcare assistant,” said Eric. “I didn’t have the means to against him and his lawyers.”
Lack of significant proof was the reason cited for dismissing the case brought in an official complaint by the third. It is indeed difficult to bring proof of abuse of confidence concerning events played out behind closed doors between a psychoanalyst and his patient.
Meanwhile, Tony Anatrella, self-styled “analyst of the French church”, remains in high grace. Apart from his different functions with the Vatican and the Collège des Bernardins, he has been given the honorary title of “Monseigneur”, which is normally the status of a bishop. “In the years that followed 2006, he took on an importance that astonished us all,” commented Dominique Bourdin, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who came into contact with Anatrella. The latter was notably present, in Paris and rome, in conferences, teaching classes and the media. “He held moral authority on homosexuality,” added Bourdin. “He was cited by bishops. He had a certain audience within the Paris diocese.”
It was at the end of the 1980s when Paris priest Tony Anatrella became known for his research on juvenile psychology. His first books, among which was Interminables Adolescences, published in 1988, gained him the interest of the prestigious French publsihing house Flammarion, which published his essay Le Sexe oublié (The forgotten sex) in 1993. “It was interesting,” conceded Dominique Bourdin. “His position on adolescence was pretty accurate,” Bourdin added.
Anatrella thus became entered the upper ranks of the Catholic intelligentsia, and began teaching at the Church’s illustrious Collège des Bernardins, and the Jesuit faculty, the Centre Sèvres. “He made his name with his theories about ‘the adolescentric society’,” said François Euvé, director of the French Jesuits’ review of reference, Etudes. “It’s for that reason that we invited him to the Centre Sèvres. Then he took up more radical positions about homosexuality.”
Tony Anatrella progressively adopted a very conservative alignment. He gave traditionalist sermons about abortion, contraception and AIDS. He also headed conferences in an institute with close ties to the Légion du Christ (the Legion of Christ), a congregation surrounded in controversy over sexual abuse allegations against its Mexican founder Marciel Maciel. “Anatrella is a great friend of the legionnaires,” former legion member Xavier Léger, who wrote a book entitled Moi, ancien légionnaire du Christ (‘Me, a former legionnaire of Christ’), told Mediapart. “He’s a guy fascinated by the Legion of Christ.”
But it is the subject of homosexuality to which Anatrella applies his grandest theories. In a 1993 book entitled Non à la société dépressive (loosely translated, ‘Against a depressive society’), he writes: “Nazism, Marxism and fascism are ideologies of a homosexual nature; their speeches, their insignia and their actions prove this at a primary level because they favour all that resembles it.” In 2005, he was one of the instigators of the Vatican order that prohibits the ordination of homosexual priests. In the daily newspaper published by the Vatican, l’Osservatore Romano, he wrote, on November 25th 2005 that homosexuality appeared “as an incompletion and a fundamental immaturity of human sexuality”.
Meanwhile, his legitimacy as a therapist is far from unanimously recognised, even among those in the Catholic Church. The priest, who presents himself as a “specialist in social psychiatry” is not a qualified doctor of psychiatry, but obtained a DEA, equivalent to a masters degree, in psychology. Unlike most of his colleagues, he belongs to no association of psychoanalysts. “He is registered nowhere, no psychologist knows him,” said Elisabeth Roudinesco, a psychoanalysts and historian, the author of biographies of psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, and who has had contact with one of Anatrella’s alleged victims.
“There is a great confusion between psychoanalysis and Catholic morals,” commented Dominican priest Laurent Lemoine, himself a psychoanalyst and a teacher at the Catholic University of Angers. “I don’t wish to send him patients, it worries me. I would not send him people who are in suffering.”
In May 2009, the French government’s inter-ministerial body responsible for combating the abuses of sects, MIVILUDES, published a report underlining the sharp rise in pseudo-psychotherapies. At the time, Tony Anatrella was questioned on the issue, as a specialist, by the magazine Famille chrétienne. "I don’t know if MIVILUDES is right to alert us about the existence of doubtful practices which, in all, remain the minority," he said. "It also favours a mistrust and suspicion towards the religious phenomenon."
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This investigation for Mediapart by Lyon-based independent journalists Daphné Gastaldi, Mathieu Martiniere and Mathieu Périsse was carried out within the framework of a journalistic collective called We Report. Other alleged victims of Tony Anatrella were identified by sources close to the case. The three journalists have set up a dedicated email address for all those who wish to testify about abuse, whether in the affair relating to Anatrella or others, notably cases relating to paedophile crimes. Witness accounts are guaranteed to remain anonymous if they wish, and the secrecy of sources, protected by law, will be rigorously upheld. If you have information you wish to pass on to the journalists, please write by email to: temoins@wereport.fr
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse