KEITH PORTEOUS WOOD SPEECH AT LIBRE PENSÉE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE ANNIVERSARY

DECEMBER 2025

As a Francophile, I was surprised and horrified to find through my work on clerical child abuse, largely for the United Nations, irrefutable evidence that the French state is institutionally subservient to the Catholic Church.ⁱ

Despite the mountain of evidence of clerical child sexual abuse, both Houses of Parliament lacked the courage to institute an independent inquiry. Instead, they urged the Church to examine itself, like asking a child to mark their own homework.

The Church established a Commission of enquiry (CIASE)ⁱⁱ and I made many suggestions to its Chair and particularly criticised CIASE’s failure to recommend – as the UN had urged – the “Establish[ment of] clear rules, mechanisms and procedures for the mandatory reporting of all suspected cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation to law”.ⁱⁱⁱ

However, to its credit, CIASE employed statisticians to estimate the number of minors that had been abused in French Catholic Church settings since 1950. They concluded there to be 330,000, suggesting there are likely to have been more than a million instances of such abuse. So, why have there been practically no prosecutions of perpetrators, or of those failing to declare their knowledge of such abuse? I believe because of a near-complete institutional failure of the French police and criminal justice system at every level.

France’s most senior catholic, Cardinal Barbarin, did not deny failing to declare knowledge of cleric who had abused numerous scouts, believed to be over 3,000, and was convicted for this failure. The conviction was achieved in the face of the refusal of the public prosecutor to act and then his attempt to sabotage the later (successful) private prosecution financed by victims and the UK National Secular Society of which I am president. Subsequent courts at every level including the Cours de la Cassation also genuflected to the Church in reversing that conviction. They did so by ruling (disingenuously in my opinion) that the duty to report abuse reverted from the Church to the victims when they became adults of sound mind. These courts must have known that most victims never disclose the abuse, and those who do only when middle-aged in most cases. But they still made the ruling.

Most shocking of all has been the actions and inactions of the French government up to the highest level. The Government representatives blatantly ignored every question posed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in writing^iv and verbally on the topic of clerical abuse alone, despite reminders.

The Committee therefore called the State party to account^v over its many shortcomings in protecting minors from clerical abuse.

Since then, we have seen (now former) Prime Minister Bayrou implausibly deny knowledge of rampant abuse of pupils at the private Catholic school at Bétharram and being supported in doing so by the President.^vi

These failures demonstrate how in our lifetimes hundreds of thousands of innocent victims have suffered intolerably, with many of their lives being utterly ruined by criminal acts of those in the Church. Yet they have largely gone unpunished, because the State which should be protecting the vulnerable has been utterly indifferent to the suffering and the crimes.

The revolution in 1789 and the reforms of 1906 were supposed to prevent the Church from being above the law, but I am afraid it still is. We must do much more to raise awareness of this and seek to reverse it.