At Lourdes plenary, French bishops under Card. Aveline tackle post-sentence priest management, school identity row, and Vatican-forced resignation.
Newsroom (11/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) The first plenary assembly of the French Bishops’ Conference under its newly elected president, Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille, was dominated by two burning issues that have shaken French Catholicism in recent months: the management of priests convicted of sexual abuse and the contested Catholic identity of the country’s 7,200 state-funded Catholic schools.
The gathering in Lourdes from November 4-9 had barely begun when the Vatican dropped a bombshell: former Bishop Jean-Paul Gusching of Verdun, who resigned in September citing health reasons, had actually been forced out after the Holy See learned of “relationships with women” that contradicted his priestly commitments.
A September 4 Vatican statement revealed that, despite Gusching’s “persistent denials” and the “fragmentary and contradictory” nature of the information, the former bishop pledged to the prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops to avoid any future behavior toward women that could be interpreted as breaching his vows.
The revelation set the tone for a week in which the bishops grappled openly with the most sensitive cases on their desks: priests who have served prison sentences for sexual violence against minors and now seek to return, in some capacity, to ecclesial life.
The most prominent recent controversy erupted in June when Archbishop Guy de Kerimel of Toulouse appointed Father Dominique Spina – convicted in 1993 of abusing a 16-year-old and sentenced to five years in prison – as diocesan chancellor, defending the decision as an act of “mercy.” After intense national criticism and pressure from fellow bishops, Archbishop Kerimel accepted Spina’s resignation on August 16.
Against this backdrop, the bishops in Lourdes launched a collective reflection aimed at establishing common national criteria for handling such cases.
“We are already acting individually, on a case-by-case basis, but now we want to reflect together to try to define common ways of doing things,” Archbishop Vincent Jordy of Tours, vice-president of the conference, told journalists on November 7.
“Sometimes, simply putting these priests out on the street makes them more dangerous than if we accompany them,” he added.
Bishop Gérard Le Stang of Amiens, who heads the bishops’ council for prevention and combating abuse, stressed the complexity of each situation. Speaking to Catholic television channel KTO, he said every bishop must now “explain how he himself has dealt with these situations up to now, and see what mistakes he has made and what he could have done better.”
“This work of discernment is complex,” Bishop Le Stang acknowledged. “Each case is different, and there is no ready-made solution.”
The assembly also addressed mounting tensions around the identity of Catholic education, which educates more than two million students – 17 percent of the French total – under contract with the state.
A fresh controversy flared in September when Guillaume Prévost, the new secretary general of Catholic education appointed by the bishops in April, declared that teachers in Catholic schools have “the right” to lead morning prayer with students, describing it as “at the heart” of the schools’ mission.
The statement provoked immediate backlash from defenders of France’s strictly secular republican school system. On November 4, Minister of Education Édouard Geffray firmly rejected the idea: “A minute paid for by the state is a minute of teaching; it is not for anything else.”
Cardinal Aveline defended the Church’s right to assert its voice in the public square. “The Church must retain its freedom to express its opinion in society, whether it is convenient or not,” the archbishop of Marseille told reporters on November 7. “The Church has a message to convey, and it must make itself heard, whether it is easy or not.”
At the same time, he warned against extremes: “While the desire for identity is perfectly legitimate, identity-based extremism is a dangerous caricature of it.”
Observing the strong identity-seeking among young people and neocatechumens, Cardinal Aveline urged the Church to accompany this aspiration positively “so that it is not exploited as an excuse for dangerous identity tensions.”
As Cardinal Aveline begins his three-year mandate, the Lourdes plenary made clear that reconciling mercy with justice on abuse cases, and preserving authentic Catholic identity in a fiercely secular society, will remain the French bishops’ most pressing and divisive challenges.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from OSV News
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