Bertrand Virieux is cut off in mid-sentence when his mobile phone rings. He looks quickly at the identity of the caller then hangs up and resumes the thread of his argument. “I was saying that Father Preynat was really a charismatic personality, everyone thought he was beyond reproach.” He is interrupted again when an incoming email makes his phone vibrate. He puts his phone in silent mode and smiles: “It's been like this every day for the past few weeks.”
Indeed, since Bertrand Virieux and other victims set up the association La Parole Libérée three months ago, he has hardly had a minute to himself. The association was set up to break the wall of silence surrounding the activities of the aforementioned Catholic priest Father Bernard Preynat at Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon in the Lyon diocese in eastern France between 1970 and 1991. The priest is accused of abusing boys in his care in the Saint-Luc scout group. The association's activities were first reported by local media, and the affair then began to break nationally following a press conference they held on January 12th, 2016. Since then the man in charge of the diocese, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, has been forced to issue an apology over the affair, while denying he was involved in a cover-up. The priest himself is now under formal investigation over the allegations, which is step short of charges being brought.
“It's hard to think that the association is only three months old,” says Bertrand Virieux. In that period the cardiologist has lost count of the trips he has made to Paris to talk to the media, and he has been forced to juggle his work and family life with that of the association. Despite that the 44-year-old is affable and relaxed when he welcomes Mediapart to the family home at Saint-Genis-Laval, a small quiet town to the south of Lyon where the houses are a discreet refuge for a section of Lyon's middle classes. The only clue to their presence is the number of private Catholic schools in the area; the collége or middle school is at the end of the street, the primary school a few hundred metres away and the lycée or secondary school is not much further. All of Bertrand Virieux's four children attend these schools. “We're surrounded,” he jokes.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Though Bertrand Virieux has not lost his sense of humour, the weeks have left their mark on him as more and more victims have come forward. On the association's website the number of personal accounts keeps mounting. For example this one from 'Cyril', aged 46, who says he was abused by Father Preynat between 1981 and 1983. “He kissed me on the mouth and I felt the contact of his tongue,” he writes. “He stroked the bottom of my back, inside my thighs, one of his hands moved inside my shorts and were between my legs and touched my penis, while his other hand made me touch his penis in the same way.” The attacks on the scouts took place in coaches in front of everyone, in the priest's tent and in the dormitories during scout camps. The words used to describe them are crude, the facts precise. And more and more victims keep coming forward to talk to the association.
“At one point we had to pass the calls on [to others],” says Dominique Murillo, Bernard Virieux's wife. “We couldn't take any more, what with the journalists, the insulting messages, the people who babbled in the night. And in the middle were victims who were trying to contact us.” Dominique Murillo, herself a psychologist and a specialist in dealing with victims, is playing an active role within the association. “In general the victims want before anything else to speak with another victim,” she says. After this initial contact she directs them towards specialist organisations or centres offering medical and psychological care. “I've accompanied about twenty of them,” she says.
The association has taken steps to ensure it can handle the number of people wanting to tell their story. A more secure forum was launched on March 21st. Just a week later it already had nearly 130 people registered “of whom 31 are victims”, says the association. Around 50 of those who are registered connect to the forum every day.
Much of the information about abuse relates to the 1980s and 1990s but some goes back as far as the 1960s. The site has also broadened its scope to cover other affairs, and has launched appeals for witnesses about priests and other dioceses. Some accounts have come from Belgium and countries in Africa. A private messaging system guarantees a certain discretion to victims who hesitate about coming forward. However, the association is careful with each new case that is brought to its attention. It cross-checks each new account and never hands over names to the press. This is important if the association wants to avoid accusations of seeking to attack the church.
In three months La Parole Libérée estimates that it has recorded close to 60 victims, a figure that is likely to increase: Father Preynat's Saint-Luc scout group received close to 400 children a year for 20 years. And new accounts continue to come in.
'I dreamt about this'
To understand the “Preynat affair” and the setting up of La Parole Libérée one has to go back to July 2014. It was then that Alexandre Dussot, who was a victim of Preynat between the ages of nine and 12, contacted the Lyon diocese to report the priest. Cardinal Barbarin sent his emissary Régine Maire, who was in charge of the diocese's 'listening unit', to meet him. That was in August of the same year. “She was a middle-aged woman, very kindly. She suggested setting up a forgiveness meeting between her and Father Preynat,” says Alexandre Dussot, who is now aged 41. The scene that took place on October 11th, 2014, between the victim, his “persecutor” and a church “psychologist” was surreal. “He admitted all the facts. He explained to me that he was attracted by little boys. At the end we all held hands and recited a Hail Mary,” Alexandre recalls.
A month later, in November 2014, Alexandre Dussot finally met Cardinal Barbarin. But nothing came of it and Father Preynat continued to officiate as a priest. For example, he was seen alongside Cardinal Barbarin at the ceremony of the blessing of holy oils on April 1st, 2015 (see photo on previous page). He was even still in post in June 2015 when Alexandre Dussot's children were blessed by the cardinal, who was still keeping silent on the issue. But after years of silence himself, Alexandre could wait no longer. He wrote first to Pope Francis then, on June 5th, 2015, to the French prosecution service.
Events suddenly began to move quickly. The prosecution service opened a preliminary investigation into the claims in June 2015 and in August Father Peyrat was finally removed of his functions by Cardinal Barbarin. In September 2015 Alexandre Dussot was interviewed by officers from the police's family protection squad the Brigade de Protection de la Famille. Then on October 23rd, to head off an investigation that La Tribune de Lyon newspaper was piecing together on Father Preynat, the diocese put out an official press release, making the affair public.
Two months later, in December of last year, two other victims, François Devaux and Bertrand Virieux, who had met each other some weeks earlier, contacted Alexandre Dussot. “François Devaux called me on December 16th. He told me that there was an enormous wall of silence, that there were dozens of victims,” says Alexandre Dussot. “And that he wanted to create an association with Bertrand Virieux and others. I hadn't even seen their faces, they weren't on social networks. Yet the next day we created the association. It was just obvious.”
So the association La Parole Libérée, centred around a handful of former boy scouts who had been sexually abused, was born on December 17th, 2015. It is a unique place of welcome for victims of paedophile priests in France. And the accounts keep coming. “Because we are many we can fight this battle openly. We have a strike power that no one was expecting,” says Laurent Duverger, who was a victim of Bernard Preynat between 1979 and 1982. “What La Parole Libérée is doing, I dreamt about this. I was hoping that if we started to speak there would be a snowball effect,” says Pierre-Emmanuel Germain-Thill, another victim who joined the association in January.
But it was the confessions of Cardinal Barbarin in an interview with the Catholic newspaper Le Croix on February 10th, 2016 in which he accepted he knew about Father Preynat's paedophile activities in 2007-2008 that really saw the affair take off in the press and gave the association media exposure. “Afterwards, when Barbarin came out with the phrase 'The events are prescribed, thank god' [editor's note, meaning that under the statute of limitations they could no longer be the object of criminal proceedings] we had a peak of 60 messages on the forum,” says Bernard Virieux with a smile.
The association today has around a dozen active members. These include victims of Father Preynat, who are often aged in their forties, but not uniquely. The blogger Franck Favre, to whose diocese of Beaujolais, north of Lyon, the priest came, is an important member of the association. “I'm the webmaster of a site which writes about our village of 300 inhabitants, Ranchal,” he says. “Having carried out a little investigation, I decided to speak about it in our newsletter which has 150 subscribers. I was shocked to find out that the diocese had put our village's children in danger,” he says. Alexandre Dussot confirms that they are starting to get other people involved in the association. “Not everyone is a victim,” he says. “Spouses are very involved. My wife is a philosopher and Bertrand's wife is a victim specialist. Two former scouts who were not victims have also joined us to run the website.”
The members of the association are mostly married with children and their ranks include a business leader, a cardiologist, a financier and a university professor. This professional and family profile reinforces La Parole Libérée's stability and power. So, too, do their Catholic background and convictions, which means that the association is far from being anticlerical in nature. “A child abused by a primary school teacher is not going to stop reading. It's the same with paedophilia in the church. We're not going to stop believing,” says Bertrand Virieux, who says he “believes in god but not longer at all in the institution”.
'Like a fixed scene from Cold Case'
The demands of the situation have turned the former scouts into investigators. Their research has enabled them to hand over precise details to the police's family protection squad and to find other victims. “We've dug out scout magazines, the Saint-Luc almanac, and there were the names of children there. Afterwards we joined social networks, Copains d'avant or Linkedin. In the evenings, after work, we made phone calls to find victims,” says Bertrand Virieux, who is the association's secretary. He adds: “We're not seeking to be a substitute for the police. We have certainly been reminded that we have to leave them to do their work now.” But already the association's activities have devastated the Catholic community, to the point where members have received insulting messages or warnings suggesting that they “check the pressure of [their] tyres” before getting into their cars.
In February 2016 Bertrand Virieux returned to the scene of the crime, Saint-Luc church at Sainte-Foy-lés-Lyon, several days before the lodging of the first formal complaint against Cardinal Barbarin for “failure to report” the sexual abuse of a minor. At his side was Pierre-Emmanuel and Axel who made formal complaints against Father Preynat in 2015. Bertrand has kept photos of this visit on his mobile phone.
“The place hasn't changed,” he says. “It's like a fixed scene of the kind you get on [television show] Cold Case. There's still the same long corridor under the church, which we called the 'corridor of death', and which led to little rooms, like cells. That's where Preynat was.” Twenty-six years later, the memories come flooding back. There was the house with the garden with Father Preynat's much-feared office. But it is not always good to dig too deep into one's memories, say some. The psychologist Dominique Murillo sometimes warns her husband about this. “If we have a mechanism to forget things, it's there for a reason,” she says.
For members of the association, however, the request for forgiveness made by Cardinal Barbarin on March 23rd is not enough to allow them to forget what has gone before. Nor are the words of Pope Francis who on March 25th, Good Friday, denounced paedophile priests. “We continue to listen, but the current condemnations have to be translated into actions,” says Bertrand Virieux. To ensure that justice can be carried out, the members of La Parole Libérée are calling for a change in the statutory time limit within which acts of paedophilia can be prosecuted, or even to remove any time limits at all.
Indeed, in the French Parliament there have in the last few weeks been moves to make a change in the law, led by former centrist senator Muguette Dini who in 2014 had already put forward a bill to “modify the time limit on public action concerning sex attacks”. The aim was in fact to remove all time limitations when it came to prosecuting sexual assaults. An amendment on this issue is due to go before the Senate between now and June of this year.
Up to now though 50 to 60 scouts have stated they were victims of a sexual assault, only four of them have been able to make a formal complaint; in the other cases the events took place outside the period prescribed in the statute of limitations. In cases involving the rape or sexual assault of a minor under the age of 15, the prescribed time period within which to make a formal complaint is 20 years, which starts at the time when the child concerned becomes an adult. “Today we know that there is post-traumatic amnesia,” says François Devaux. “But a victim has just until their 38th birthday to start judicial proceedings. So when you're 37 years and six months old you must be sufficiently stable in your mind, in your life, to get past the shame of having experienced sexual violence from an adult when you were young.”
François Devaux, who is the president of the association, insists that without these statute of limitations restrictions dozens of cases of rape that have been highlighted would also have led to criminal proceedings. As of now, on top of the four formal complaints against the priest, the cardinal and other members of the diocese face three claims of failing to report the abuse. A fourth complaint is still being worked on.
Since the “Pandora's Box” was opened, the members of the association have learnt to protect their private lives. Many of them have had to distance themselves from their parents, who have been subjected to social pressures, to the wall of silence or have been gnawed away by the guilt of not having done anything. This has meant protecting the inner core of their families, who have been deeply exposed to the controversies raised by the affair; in particular the children.
Last week one of Bertrand Virieux's daughters at a local private Catholic school was surprised to find herself face to face with a large portrait hung in her classroom. It was of cardinal Barbarin. When she came home from school she told her parents: “I had the impression that his eyes were following me all the time.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter