French investigator: As many as 10 thousand victims of clerical sexual abuse

The man leading a commission established by France’s Catholic bishops to investigate clerical sexual abuse and hierarchical coverup has said that Church officials vastly underestimated the number of victims over the past 70 years, and that the real number of victims could be closer to 10 thousand.

Jean-Marc Sauvé, the highly regarded 71-year-old career civil servant and former vice-president of France’s Council of State, told reporters on Tuesday that a June 2020 figure of 3,000 victims “is certainly an underestimate.”