French Bishops Kneel in Repentance for Abuse of Thousands of Children

Senior members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in France have knelt at the shrine of Lourdes in a gesture of repentance, a day after bishops acknowledged the Church’s responsibility for decades of abuse against children, reports The Guardian.

In Lourdes, a pilgrimage site for Christians, approximately 120 archbishops, bishops, and laypeople gathered for the unveiling of a photograph depicting a sculpture representing the head of a crying child. At the request of the victims, the clergy did not wear their religious vestments for the ceremony.

The wall on which the photograph is mounted will serve as a "place of memory" for the victims. The photograph was taken by one of the abuse victims. Furthermore, the suffering endured by one of them was detailed in a passage read by another survivor.

Just a day earlier, after voting at their annual assembly, French bishops officially acknowledged that the Catholic Church bears "institutional responsibility" for thousands of cases of child sexual abuse. The assembly also recognized that the Church allowed the abuses to become "systemic."

Cases of sexual abuse reaching back to the 1950s involving at least 216,000 minors were extensively documented in an independent report published a month ago, which spoke of the "veil of silence" that has shrouded the scandal.