PARIS (FRANCE)
The Times [England]
June 1, 2026
By David Chazan
The bill proposed by President Macron’s centrist group has angered Catholic leaders, who say it would undermine a cornerstone of the faith
Priests should have to reveal what they hear in confession if it includes accounts of child abuse, a bill before the French parliament proposes.
The bill, tabled by President Macron’s centrist group, would end a longstanding bar on priests revealing anything heard in confession. It has prompted fierce opposition from Catholic leaders.
Revelations of widespread child abuse at a private Catholic school in southwest France have prompted allegations that Church and school authorities failed to act. Former pupils at the school, Notre-Dame de Bétharram, have filed 200 lawsuits alleging abuse, more than 90 of them related to sexual abuse.
The bill says: “For decades, a climate of omerta, the failure of the state [and] a culture legitimising violence against children has allowed criminals in schools to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of pupils.” If passed, the bill would compel priests to report accounts of child abuse heard in confession to the authorities.
The Bishops’ Conference of France acknowledged the “necessary and urgent” need to combat child abuse but denounced any weakening of the “absolutely inviolable” secrecy of confession. In Catholic theology, the “seal” of confession is absolute and priests who disclose what a penitent has said may be excommunicated.
France has officially been without a state religion since 1905, but its civil law has largely mirrored this religious obligation until now, treating confessions as a form of “professional secrecy”. Courts cannot compel priests to reveal confessions and if they chose to do so, the disclosures would not normally be admissible as evidence.
The National Rally of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella condemned the bill as a “brutal and anticlerical attack” on private schools, most of which are Catholic in France.
Roger Chudeau, a Rally MP, said the bill unfairly “targeted” religious schools such as Notre-Dame de Bétharram as being “responsible for mistreatment” and sought to bring them under state control.
François Bayrou, a centrist former prime minister and mayor of Pau, near Bétharram, denied knowing about the abuse at the school, where his wife taught and his children were pupils. The scandal tarnished his reputation, however, and he failed to be re-elected as mayor in March.
Despite an inquiry in 2021 concluding that more than 200,000 children had been sexually abused by priests in France since the 1950s, the head of the French Catholic church insisted that the secrecy of confessionals overrode legislation on abuse. The government condemned the comments by Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, archbishop of Reims and at the time chairman of the Bishops’ Conference of France.