Survivors

Victims of sexual abuse committed by Jesuits. That phrase sums up what men did to us—members of the Society of Jesus—within the very walls of Saint-Michel College in Brussels, men who were able to operate there with complete impunity for many years.

No, we must say decades. For decades, Fathers Henry Collard, Léopold Derbay, Jules Francken, Alfred Marie Laurent, and Albert Stevens committed not abuse, but crimes. The rape of a child is not abuse; it is far more. It is a killing—a conscious and deliberate killing—that the victims continue to carry out throughout a chaotic and self-destructive life. As soon as there has been the slightest violence against a child, however minimal yet brutal it may be, you will find an adult trying to destroy themselves. The victim conscientiously finishes the work of their executioner.

That is why we no longer refer to ourselves as victims, but as survivors. People who made it out alive. We who speak have survived the unspeakable, the programmed destruction of our entire being—our body and our soul—the theft of our mind and our life. It is speech, the force of words, the power of names, that has kept us alive, survivors of a shipwreck, and that has allowed us not to go under.

But speech does even more. Speech saves lives. By testifying publicly, we know that other voices, until now forbidden by their authors imprisoned in silence, will be set free. Because speech carries recognition within it. Even before the first word, we recognize one another; we share what goes beyond all words, and which drives us—sometimes in rage—to put things into words, to speak the names of our executioners, because we survived them.

If, as the poet Paul Celan wrote, no one bears witness for the witness, it is no doubt because we are these over-survivors, people rescued from a storm that cannot be described, living somehow above the living, never quite aligned. Nevertheless, if we bear witness, it is of course also, and perhaps above all, for those who cannot do so—either because they are dead or because they are far from the centers of power. It is for them, through them, that we speak.

So let us imagine, Henry Collard, Jules Francken, Léopold Derbay, Alfred Marie Laurent, Albert Stevens—let us imagine that we had spoken earlier, much earlier, and that our words had sent you to prison or to a place where your harmfulness could no longer act. Yes, let us imagine that, and go further: let us imagine that at some point we had expressed the wish to meet you—Henry Collard, Albert Stevens, and the others—as can be done in a process of restorative justice. We would have asked you essential questions: Why me? What pleasure did you take in destroying us? Is it conceivable that this destruction did not reach your conscience? Now that you are prevented from acting, do you acknowledge the perversity of your deeds? Do you consider yourselves ill? Do you need care? To these imagined questions we will never have answers—but would answers have had the power to lessen the absolute distress of our lives?

In September 2024, some survivors met Pope Francis in Brussels; in November 2025, the same people met his successor, Leo XIV, in Rome. Francis considered financial compensation of €50,000 to be insufficient. Leo XIV, after hearing that the costs of medical treatments in the broad sense were fully or partially covered by mutual insurance funds, clearly stated that the Church of Belgium had a debt toward those mutual funds, since they are supported by the state—a debt it was obliged to honor.

Two strong statements that have remained without effect to this day—words like wind, words emptied of meaning because they are inaudible to the managers of this church, bogged down in its contradictions and its turpitude despite its apologies repeated to the point of weariness. But we believe in the power of speech, which breaks silences and taboos in order to become an act.

Jean Marc Turine and Bruno Tackels