The historic site of Notre-Dame de Bétharram, at the heart of a scandal of physical and sexual violence, will close this summer and students will study at the start of the school year on another site a few kilometers away, the general secretary of Catholic education announced on Tuesday.
The Lestelle-Bétharram college “will close at the end of the school year, and the entire educational community, including 170 students, will be welcomed at the start of the school year on the Igon site”, 4 km away, which already hosts a primary school and a high school, indicated Guillaume Prévost, repeating comments made to Le Parisien.
Work worth “a few hundred thousand euros” will be completed in the summer to ensure the transfer in September, while “several million euros of investment over several years” are planned for the educational project of the school complex, he specifies.
In addition to the closure of this site, “the work of memory and recognition of the victims” will continue, in particular in the light of “the conclusions of the report published by the Louis Joinet institute” on June 20, says Guillaume Prévost.
According to this NGO specializing in transitional justice in conflict zones, which investigated for more than a year at the request of the implicated congregation of Fathers of Bétharram, between 700 and 1,500 students potentially suffered “exceptionally serious violence” at Notre-Dame de Bétharram and in other establishments of the religious congregation.
This “order of magnitude”, taken from several statistical projections “to be interpreted with extreme caution”, reflects decades of “systemic” and “institutional violence”, from 1950 to 2000, according to the institute.
Nearly 250 complaints
Today, the school group renamed Le Beau Rameau also has two boarding schools: one for boys in Lestelle-Bétharram and one for girls in Igon.
On June 20, the federation of Catholic education management organizations (Fnogec) deplored in a letter of formal notice, addressed to the local OGEC, that “nothing is visibly moving forward in terms of relocation of all classes to Igon”.
Violence in Betharram had been denounced since the 1990s, but it was from the fall of 2023 that testimonies from former students denouncing forced fellatio and masturbation, torture and humiliation increased.
Most of these abuses documented in nearly 250 complaints are time-barred, due to the age of the facts. Only two men, a layman and a religious, were indicted.
