The religious congregation of the Fathers of Betharram, which has long led the Catholic establishment at the heart of a vast matter of physical violence and rape, recognized its “responsibility” in an interview with AFP on Tuesday, March 4. Speaking in the name of his peers, the priest Laurent Bacho assured feeling “responsible” in the face of the “suffering of these children […] destroyed “. This speaking was eagerly awaited by many victims who accused the Betharramitis religious of” mutism “since the start of the case.
“I speak in the name of the congregation to say that we are always very affected by what happened […] By the sufferings of these children who had come here to be protected, educated “but to which the opposite” happened: “They were destroyed,” said Laurent Bacho, 75 and former regional vicar of Betharramites. “To reach an irrevocable common position, it took us time,” he admits.
At the same time, the congregation announces the creation of a new compensation fund for victims of prescribed sexual violence committed by lay people, while the field of action of the Recognition and Repair Commission (CRR) set up by the Church since 2021 is limited to those committed by religious.
Another measure is the launch of an independent commission of inquiry to identify “the causes” of “massive abuses” committed for decades in this college-lycée of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques under contract with national education. The future commission of inquiry, whose members must still be defined, will collect the words of the victims “in different countries” where the congregation has establishments and “can study the archives”, detailed Laurent Bacho. It will have to set up tools to avoid new “blindness”, he added.
Most of the facts denounced are prescribed
The creation of the new compensation fund will be funded by “the sale of the few real estate” belonging to the congregation in the municipality of Lestelle-Bétharram, he said. For the time being, compensation of 19 victims via the CRR, up to 700,000 euros, has absorbed 60 % of its finances.
“Financial compensation is important because it gives weight to our words,” said Laurent Bacho. The congregation also wants to act on the “memorial” level, with the idea of building a monument or installing a plate. She will participate in a forum on sexual violence organized on March 15 in Bayonne by the Francophone Institute for Justice and Democracy (IFJD), an NGO that has accompanied it since May in its approach to the victims.
Former religious and secular staff of Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram are targeted by more than 150 complaints filed by former students for physical violence, sexual assault and rape. After a year of investigation, the Pau prosecutor’s office opened a judicial investigation ten days ago and a former supervisor born in 1965 was indicted and placed in pre -trial detention. The vast majority of the facts denounced, which date back to the 1950s and spread over half a century, are prescribed.
“The State was not there” in this case, had regretted on February 21 the Minister of National Education, Elisabeth Borne, about this establishment almost never inspected in thirty years apart from a control in 1996 having noted anything abnormal despite already reports of violence. Elisabeth Borne had however deplored “the political exploitation” of this case which splashes the head of government François Bayrou. Minister of Education between 1993 and 1997, at the time of some of the incriminated facts, he repeats that he had “never been informed” in the past of sexual violence in this establishment that have attended by several of his children and where his wife taught catechism, despite testimonies affirming the contrary.