Pas-de-Calais: a man sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison for burning down four churches
A 30-year-old who confessed to having set fire to four churches in Pas-de-Calais, according to him in reaction to pedophilia cases within the Catholic Church, was sentenced Monday to three and a half years in prison with continued detention, accompanied by a socio-judicial follow-up of three years with the obligation of psychotherapy care.
This 36-year-old man, recently released from prison and housed in a home for the homeless, was arrested in flagrante delicto in November, and he has been incarcerated since. At the hearing on Monday, he admitted all the facts with which he was charged by the Boulogne-sur-Mer court.
“The priests are pointers”
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Boulogne at the end of October, or even Saint-Pierre Saint-Paul in the neighboring town of Portel: in total, he was prosecuted for the degradation by fire of four churches in Boulogne. On the night of November 26 to 27, police on patrol at Portel noticed him as he went back and forth near the church, where they discovered curtains on fire.
“I opened, I burned and I left,” said the defendant at the bar of the criminal court on Monday. He explained that he acted “because of [son] past”: abandoned by his parents and assigned to a foster family, he recounts having been “raped” by his adoptive father “from the age of 5 to 6 and a half”. “Every time I watch TV and all that, the priests are pointers (pedophiles, editor’s note). This is why I attack the churches,” he said.
A “real mental suffering” of the accused
According to the psychiatrist who examined him, the defendant, already imprisoned for thefts, presents “real mental suffering” and “is trying to be in prison because he sends himself there more safely than outside”. But Me Lamoril, lawyer for the diocese of Arras, believes that the arsonist is “master of himself”: “He causes drafts to fan the fire, but is careful to insulate the gas cylinders. »
A commission charged by the French Catholic Church to investigate pedocrime within this institution had revealed in a report submitted at the beginning of October that 216,000 the number of children and adolescents who have been victims of clerics and religious since 1950. This report sent shock waves through the Church and beyond.