“I reaffirm here the work of the Church in France so that the truth about the acts of sexual assault and violence is known. (…). I call on all other institutions and organizations to do the same. “We owe it to the victims.”wrote, on September 16, the president of the French Episcopal Conference (CEF), Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, in a column about Abbé Pierre published in the world. A few days earlier he had announced the opening to journalists and researchers of the episcopal archive relating to the priest who founded Emmaus, today accused of sexual violence.
In fact, the documents (mainly letters sent or received by prelates), which the world consulted, they testify to a progressive awareness, since the 1950s, of deviant behavior on the part of Abbé Pierre – although they are never really qualified – as well as the desire of the French episcopate to “avoid their revelation at all costs.” But the archives also suggest that the secret was kept within a perimeter that went beyond the ecclesiastical sphere.
Is ” disease “, his “numerous moral accidents” : “All this greatly worried those responsible for Emmaus, who did not want to see the founder return”wrote, for example, Jean-Marie Villot, then secretary general of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France (ancestor of the CEF), to the archbishop of Besançon, in 1958, shortly after the internment of Abbé Pierre in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland – internment decided in common agreement with Emmaus.
What exactly did those responsible for Emmaus know? What time? The Church records do not tell us this. As for those of Emmaus, preserved in the National Archive of the World of Work in Roubaix (North), they represent approximately 330 linear meters, with, on the one hand, the personal archives of Abbé Pierre and, on the other, those of the organization , “which have been much less explored”according to Adrien Chaboche, general delegate of Emmaus International, legatee of the two funds.
“A very big cleaning”
“The documentation there is immense, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And there are huge holes, there are whole months left.”inform the World the historian Axelle Brodiez-Dolino, who consulted them for her work Emmaus and Abbot Pierre (Sciences Po Presses, 2009). He now suspects that the movement’s teams have made a mistake on this point. “a very big cleanup in the 1950s; everything has been written methodically”. You suspect that Adrien Chaboche says he cannot confirm or deny.
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