A new report says that, over the past 70 years, some 330,000 French children were sexually abused by at least 3,000 Roman Catholic priests and an unknown number of others involved in the church.
Not only was the abuse committed by priests and others in authority in the church, but Catholic authorities covered up the crimes in a "systemic manner" and for decades, according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.
The commission worked for two and a half years, listening to victims and witnesses and studying church, court, police, and news archives starting from the 1950s.
The independent commission urged the church to take strong action, denouncing its "faults" and "silence." It also called on the Catholic Church to help compensate the victims, notably in cases that are too old to prosecute via French courts.
"We consider the church has a debt towards victims," Sauvé said.
Francois Devaux, head of the victims' group La Parole Libérée (The Liberated Word), said it was "a turning point in our history." He denounced the coverups that permitted "mass crimes for decades."
"But even worse, there was a betrayal: betrayal of trust, betrayal of morality, betrayal of children, betrayal of innocence," he added.
Olivier Savignac, the head of victims' association Parler et Revivre (Speak Out and Live Again), contributed to the investigation. He told the Associated Press that the high ratio of victims per abuser was particularly "terrifying for French society, for the Catholic Church."
Savignac denounced the church for treating reported cases as individual anomalies instead of as a collective horror. He described being abused at age 13 by the director of a Catholic vacation camp in the south of France; the director was accused of also assaulting several other boys.
"I perceived this priest as someone who was good, a caring person who would not harm me," Savignac said. "But it was when I found myself on that bed half-naked and he was touching me that I realized something was wrong... It's like gangrene inside the victim's body and the victim's psyche."
Pope Francis expressed "shame" when he commented on the findings.
"There is, unfortunately, a considerable number. I would like to express to the victims my sadness and pain for the trauma that they suffered," Francis said.
"It is also my shame, our shame, my shame, for the incapacity of the church for too long to put them at the center of its concerns."
The report was released October 5, and the pope responded to it during his regular audience at the Vatican on October 6.
The 2,500-page document was issued as the Catholic Church in France, as in other countries, sought to face up to secret crimes. Victims welcomed the report as long overdue, and the head of the French bishops' conference asked for their forgiveness.
The report said the tally of 330,000 victims includes an estimated 216,000 people abused by priests and other clerics, and the rest by church figures such as scout leaders or camp counselors.
The estimates are based on a broader research by France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research into sexual abuse of children in the country. The study's authors estimate 80% of the church's victims were boys, while the study of broader sexual abuse found that 75% of the child victims of all abusers were girls.