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France

Satanic celebration
Christian leaders resist Halloween

Catholic and Protestant leaders called on the French people not to celebrate the “imported American holiday” of Halloween because it is a pagan ritual, a celebration of Satan.

The Catholic bishops’ conference said: “Skeletons and witches, pumpkins and ghosts ... how long can this marketing operation called Halloween continue to distort our sense of life and death?” The Salvation Army’s weekly newspaper En Avant wrote: “Halloween refers, like All Saints, to those who have gone before us to the beyond. Except that one makes fun of it and the other is done in reverence.” The feast of All Saints, on November 1, is a national holiday in traditionally Catholic France.

Schools have also been criticized for holding Halloween-related events. “I don’t think teachers mean to develop paganism; it’s more that they are poorly informed, which is just as bad,” said Jean-Arnold de Clermont, president of the French Federation of Protestants.

No safe havens
Church vows action on child abuse

The French bishops’ conference has vowed not to give safe haven to child abusers within the Church, after recent charges that bishops turned a blind eye to pedophile priests for decades.

The bishops issued their statement following a meeting at the Marian shrine in Lourdes. “When the aggressor is a priest it’s a double betrayal,” they said. “The bishop’s responsibility in this domain is clear but it is also delicate. He cannot stand back passively, and even less so cover for criminal acts.”

They continued, “But pedophilia is still a poorly understood phenomenon: it hides, it is rarely admitted, and it is often difficult for a bishop to gather enough hard evidence to establish whether a priest has indeed carried out acts of a pedophile nature.”

The bishops’ statement follows the October sentencing of a priest to 18 years in prison for repeatedly raping one boy and abusing several others over the course of more than a decade. Officials are also investigating charges that a bishop may have failed to report a potential crime after being made aware of the allegations.