This contribution focuses on a specific case of abuse in an ecclesial context, namely violence committed by Abbé Pierre, a prominent French figure in the fight against homelessness, founder of Emmaüs, and a Catholic priest. Adopting a historical approach, the research focuses on the role played by Lucie Coutaz (1899-1982), co-founder of Emmaüs and personal secretary to Abbé Pierre from 1945 to 1980. Lucie Coutaz experienced a healing from bone tuberculosis in Lourdes at 22, spent 17 years as a Daughter of the Heart of Mary, and shared the same accommodation as Abbé Pierre from 1946 to her death. She offers a relevant case study of "women of goodwill" confronted with sexual violence. She did not leave any primary source clarifying her stance regarding Abbé Pierre's behaviour and stood by him until her death. Still, written records indicate that she had been made aware. Her prior involvement in Catholic women's unions as a local leader, and in the French Resistance, for which she was awarded a military decoration, seem inconsistent with her silence. A negative methodology is chosen to approach this silence. Leaving a paradigm of recoverability, the focus shifts to absences, erasures, traces and fragments as they are. However scarce in explicit mentions of abuse, numerous archives were sourced from various institutions and private persons. They shed light on power asymmetries as well as social and religious representations that account for the conditions of possibility of Lucie Coutaz's silence. Drawing on sociology, the study characterises silence as a social practice, intertwining different actors within an organisation marked by internal conflicts. Stakeholders mobilise different frames of analysis, leaving room for misunderstanding. Silence develops both as a constrained and performative process, its consequences reaching beyond the context from which it emerged.