The French bishops’ conference is facing backlash after it unveiled a new identity card for clerics, with a scannable QR code that can convey whether a priest or deacon’s ministry is restricted.
Newsroom (17/05/2023 1:390 PM, Gaudium Press) The card uses a traffic light system, with green for a clear record, amber for restrictions not necessarily related to safeguarding, and red when a priest is no longer permitted to celebrate Mass publicly or hear confessions.
But the system has provoked criticism, with victims-survivors advocates describing it as “one of the Catholic Church’s top three most stupid ideas.” Critics dismissed it as a gimmick that did not address the causes of abuse and questioned whether it infringed on clerics’ privacy. Supporters meanwhile said it would give parishes a more efficient and accurate way to check the credentials of visiting clergy.
The bishops’ conference unveiled the card on May 5 after French bishops voted in 2021 and again in 2022 for a new national ID card system for bishops, priests, and deacons.
They adopted the measure following a devastating report on abuse in the French Catholic Church from 1950 to 2020 by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE). But ID cards were not among the report’s 45 recommendations.
According to the website France 24, François Devaux, the former president of the abuse survivors’ group La Parole Libérée, said that the ID card was “quite an exceptional measure which, in my opinion, is one of the Catholic Church’s top three most stupid ideas.”
“If we have to scan the QR codes of clergy members to reassure Catholics, it means the Church has hit a new low. It’s nothing more than a publicity stunt, and it shows the extent to which trust has been broken between the faithful and their hierarchy,” he said.
He added: “This new ineptitude is a sign of the Church’s idleness. It has not understood the criticism it has faced, nor does it want to. In any case, the initiative is a far cry from the measures that were recommended in the CIASE report.”
Olivier Savignac, the co-founder of Parler et Revivre, an organization supporting abuse victims, questioned whether “people of a certain age” who oversaw parishes would be able to operate the online system.
“We would have liked to have a file, especially about the abusers, the aggressors, as is the case in the United States, where there is a list that can be consulted at the level of the dioceses and in a public way,” he said. “In France, this is not the case.”
France 24 noted that the introduction of the cards had sparked a debate on social media about whether they infringed privacy.
Christine Pedotti, director of the weekly magazine Témoignage Chrétien, said that the ID cards were “a good idea given the current context, and should prove quite useful.”
But she added that the measure didn’t address the demands made in the CIASE report and was “a small tool that, when compared to the scale of the problem, just isn’t enough.”
French bishops received their ID cards at their March plenary assembly at Lourdes. The country’s 13,000 priests and 3,000 permanent deacons are expected to have cards by the end of the year.
Dioceses and religious congregations will be asked to update the status of all clergy annually, but immediately when restrictions are imposed on an individual.
According to the Catholic weekly Famille Chrétienne, groups of French bishops have visited Rome this year to study the handling of abuse cases.
It said that a group of 30 bishops is visiting the Vatican May 15-16, meeting with officials from the Dicastery for Bishops and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from The Pillar
Related Images:
