French prime minister's daughter says she was beaten at Catholic school camp

PARIS (OSV News) -- A decades-old abuse scandal at a Catholic school in southern France is back in the spotlight -- this time with political fallout.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou was for months accused by political opponents of dishonesty over his knowledge of the allegations regarding Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a Catholic school in southern France. His daughter has now revealed in a new book she wants "to be recognized as a victim."

Alain Esquerre, the founder of the Collective of Victims of Violence suffered in the religious-run institution, in a book published April 24 titled "The Silence of Bétharram," gathered testimonies of alleged assaults, including alleged rapes committed in the school against minors by clergy and laypeople, between 1950 and 2010, but mainly in the 1980s.

Esquerre filed 200 complaints in state courts in recent months, in the name of victims, for physical, psychological and sexual violence committed by religious and laypeople against children at the Catholic school in Bétharram.

Speaking on the national public radio station France Inter on the morning of April 24, Esquerre explained that his book aimed to "analyze the mechanics of the perverse silence surrounding the victims' experiences."

Since February, the Bétharram case has taken on a political dimension, with the involvement of Prime Minister Bayrou, who comes from the same region in the Pyrenées. His children were educated at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, which over the years changed its name to Le Beau Rameau Catholic School. His wife also used to teach catechism class there.

The prime minister, who has been criticized for his lack of clarity and responsiveness on this issue, was France's education minister and a member of Parliament at the time reports of the alleged abuse came to light in the mid-1990s. Also, the school is in the district Bayrou represented as a member of the French Parliament.

On May 14, he will testify before a parliamentary commission of inquiry on the prevention of violence in schools following the action of the Esquerre collective.

Among the testimonies gathered by Esquerre in his book was that of Bayrou's eldest daughter, Hélène Perlant, who is now 53 and uses her mother's name. She revealed that she, too, was a victim of a violent assault at the age of 14, at a scout camp run by the religious congregation responsible for Bétharram, the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Bétharram.

"For my part, I did not experience this violence at the school itself," she said on April 24 on France Inter. "I was in high school with the older students, and we had no idea about the violence experienced by the younger middle school students, who were only a few meters away from us."

She said that during the camp, as they were unpacking their sleeping bags, suddenly the religious father who was their caretaker "grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several meters, then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach," she told the Paris Match magazine's April 23 issue. "I wet myself and stayed like that all night, damp and rolled up in a ball in my sleeping bag," she said.

"Bétharram was organized like a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on pupils and teachers so they stayed silent," Perlant told the Paris Match. "I kept quiet about it for 30 years."

Perlant doesn't blame her father for not being aware of the abuse. "About what happened to me, I didn't say anything at the time, and no one else spoke up, even though there were about 40 witnesses around me," she said on the radio program.

In the Paris Match magazine interview, she added: "Perhaps unconsciously I wanted to protect my father from political blows he was receiving locally."

For Perlant, the silence that accompanied the violence was not a lie, but rather an "individual and collective denial" that affected young people at the time.

During the spring plenary assembly of the French bishops in the first week of April, Esquerre went to Lourdes to give his testimony directly to the bishops. He spoke personally to Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort of Reims and outgoing president of the French bishops' conference.

"We were shocked to hear facts that we could not have imagined," Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort testified at the April 4 closing press conference of the bishops' assembly.

The same day, the bishops stated that the issue of abuse in schools would be a priority for them in the coming years. They invited victims of violence in Catholic schools to come forward to diocesan counseling centers or go directly to the authorities to file complaints.

"Until now, we have not given enough importance to what has happened in schools," Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille said at the press conference following his election as president of the bishops' conference on April 3.

"The facts that have recently come to light show that we can and must take a much closer interest in schools."

To this end, the bishops have chosen a former senior civil servant, Guillaume Prévost, as the new secretary general of Catholic education of the French bishops' conference, which represents over 7,000 Catholic schools that receive government funding.

Prévost was tasked with working closely on this issue with the Bishop Matthieu Rougé of Nanterre, former chaplain to parliamentarians and a well-known figure in French political circles, whom the bishops appointed president of the Council for Catholic Education.