We’ve been bombarded with attacks from trolls who claim that the Catholic Church is nothing but a pedophile ring for years but the attacks seem to be ramping up. One troll in particular claims ad nauseam that “330,000 children in France were raped by 3,000 catholic priests.” He never leaves a citations and never engages beyond his claim. People may take it at face value. There was clearly an abuse epidemic in the Church in the 20th century so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility, but it turns out the claim may be another hoax, similar to the Canadian mass graves hoax.

The claim appears to be based on a report entitled “Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church France 1950 – 2020” and which claims an estimated 216,000 victims of abuse in that time.

While this report seems official, there are many issues with it. As reported by Catholic News Agency, the prestigious Académie Catholique de France has published a devastating 15-page critique of the report, citing the report’s complete lack of “scientific rigor” and concluding that the report was meant to “feed the narrative of a ‘systemic’ character and lay the groundwork for proposals to bring down the Church-institution.”

The Media Report outlines the issues:

• What the report called “victims” were actually just random accusers, as citizens all across France were encouraged to fill out an “anonymous online questionnaire,” allowing just about any crank to say just about anything without any scrutiny. (This was not unlike the time in 2018 when an anonymous “tip line” was established for anyone to accuse Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sex crimes during his confirmation hearings; and, in the words of a Washington insider, “Every whack-job in the world called in to that thing.”)
• Despite an investigation lasting three years, the report’s commission only interviewed a mere 174 accusers. So, 174 / 216,000, or 0.081% (0.00081) of the total.
• The commission also interviewed only 11 priests alleged to have committed abuse many decades ago. Only 11? That was the real scandal there.
• Well over half of the accused priests were long dead and no longer around to defend themselves. The vast majority of accusations were never even fully investigated.

In a lengthy response to the Académie Catholique, the authors of the original abuse report refreshingly admitted that “we cannot ensure that there is no significant bias affecting [the] estimates” and that, “as a matter of principle, all statistics derived from a survey are subject to errors of many kinds … [T]here is never a total guarantee, because there is always an error due to sampling and non-response.”

As ever, the Catholic Church is under attack. False claims like these are asserted as fact in order to discredit the Church and force Her to abandon the Truth. It’s a tactic we’ve seen through the last 100 years in the communist infiltration and it persists for any number of ideological ends.