PARIS (FRANCE)
National Secular Society [London, England]
January 6, 2026
By Keith Porteous Wood
Despite achieving constitutional separation from the Catholic Church after much bloodshed, the French state is still subservient to the Church when it comes to child abuse, says Keith Porteous Wood.
The 120th anniversary of France’s landmark law codifying the separation of Church and state was commemorated last month. The 1905 law’s ideological origin was of course the Revolution of 1789, which sought to end, through the establishment of a republic, the corruption and excessive power of the monarchs, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church.
However, France wasn’t the first jurisdiction to make religious freedom a right and forbid state support for religion – the US state of Virginia was. There, the Anglican Church was established just as it was, and still is, in England. Virginia’s stance formed the template for the first amendment to the US Constitution in 1789, thanks to visionaries James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the latter of whom devoted his life to replicating these concepts in other countries, starting with France.
Now, nearly 250 years later, let’s examine what has been achieved, and what still needs to be done.
In 1789 after much bloodshed, French citizens managed to form a unicameral National Assembly, which was eventually supported by Louis XVI, the aristocracy, and even many clergy. It codified the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen but, surprisingly, these were deemed to be “under the auspices of the Supreme Being”. I expect the inclusion of that phrase was the price for the support, however reluctantly, of the monarch and clergy. Indeed, Pope Pius X later said: “That the state must be separated from the church is an absolutely false thesis, a most pernicious error.” He added it was “gravely insulting to God, for the creator of man is also the founder of human societies and he preserves them in existence as he sustains us”.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was the basis of the French Republics of 1852, 1946 and (the current one) 1958. It influenced constitutions in 19th century Europe and South America; the postwar United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in Paris in 1948; and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.
The Declaration was a magnificent achievement, as was the establishment of the National Assembly. But in other respects, the intervening years since the Revolution have been a rough and not especially successful ride from a secularist perspective.
Even the 1905 law to formalise the separation of Church and state was a compromise to appease royalists and those who opposed secularism. The law mentioned “separation” but not laïcité – the requirement that the state stay neutral towards all religions, finance no religion, and prohibit religious expression in public institutions. The term “secularism” only entered the constitution in 1946.
A serious practical violation of secularism post 1905 has been the state funding of Catholic schools. But far worse than that, in my opinion, appears to be the complete submission to this day of the state to the Church. Secularists were enraged when the current President Emmanuel Macron told Catholic bishops in one of his first major speeches in 2018: “We intuitively share the feeling that the bond between the Church and the state has been damaged, and that both you and I need to repair it”.
This statement was a harbinger of what was to come.
We have witnessed the French state’s institutional subservience to the Catholic Church through its inaction on clerical child sexual abuse. Despite the mountain of evidence for child sexual abuse in the Church, neither Houses of Parliament have had the courage to institute an independent inquiry. Instead, they urged the Church to examine itself. It’s like asking a child to mark their own homework.
In response, the Church established a commission of enquiry on child sexual abuse (CIASE). I have made many suggestions to its Chair and particularly criticised CIASE’s failure to recommend – as the UN has urged – the establishment of “clear rules, mechanisms and procedures for the mandatory reporting of all suspected cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation to law enforcement authorities”.
To its credit, CIASE employed statisticians to estimate the number of minors who have been abused in French Catholic Church settings since 1950. They concluded there have been 330,000 such victims, suggesting there are likely to have been more than a million instances of such abuse. So, why have there been practically no prosecutions of perpetrators, or of those failing to declare their knowledge of such abuse as the law has required since 2000? I believe this is because of a near-complete institutional failure of the French police and criminal justice system at every level.
Consider the case of Cardinal Barbarin, France’s most senior Catholic as Archbishop of Lyon from 2002 to 2020. He did not deny failing to declare knowledge of a cleric who had abused an estimated 3,000 scouts over several decades, many of whom were probably raped. The public prosector failed to act on Barbarin, and then later tried to sabotage a (successful) private prosecution financed by victims and the National Secular Society.
Unfortunately, subsequent courts at every level including the Cours de la Cassation (France’s Supreme Court) also genuflected to the Church in reversing that conviction. They did so by ruling that the duty to report abuse reverted from the Church to the victims when they became adults of sound mind. This smacks of disingenuousness; the courts must have known that most victims never disclose the abuse, and in most cases those who do only disclose when middle aged.
Most shocking of all have been the recent actions, or rather inactions, of the French government up to the highest level. In 2021, government representatives blatantly ignored every question on the topic of clerical abuse posed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in writing and verbally, despite reminders.
The Committee therefore called the State party to account over its many shortcomings in protecting minors from clerical abuse.
Since then, we have seen (now former) Prime Minister Bayrou implausibly denying knowledge of rampant abuse of pupils at the private Catholic school at Bétharram and being supported in doing so by the President.
These failures demonstrate how, in our lifetimes, hundreds of thousands of innocent victims have suffered intolerably, with many of their lives being utterly ruined by criminal acts of those in the Church. Yet these acts have largely gone unpunished, because the state which should be protecting the vulnerable has been utterly indifferent to their suffering and the crimes against them.
The revolution in 1789 and the reforms of 1905 were supposed to prevent the Church from being above the law. But I am afraid it still is.
This is adapted from a speech Keith Porteous Wood gave in Paris to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and the State.