The French court opened on Monday (7) an investigation against 11 bishops and former bishops to investigate cases related to sexual crimes. Among those investigated is a French cardinal who allegedly admitted to “reprehensible behavior” with a minor 35 years ago, when he was still a parish priest.
Jean-Pierre Ricard, 78, a former bishop of Bordeaux, has been named as the first Catholic cleric of that status to confess to the abuse of a minor. The revelation of the crime against the 14-year-old was made by the head of the Episcopal Conference of France, Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, in Lourdes, where an annual meeting takes place.
“My behavior necessarily caused serious and lasting consequences for this person,” the cardinal reportedly wrote in a message read by Moulins-Beaufort. In addition to confessing to the crime, he would have asked the victim for forgiveness and placed himself at the disposal of justice, both civil and canonical.
The revelation represents another blow to the Catholic Church in France related to sexual abuse. Last year, a report released by an independent commission pointed out that approximately 216,000 minors were victims of priests and religious in the country from 1950 to 2020. In most cases, however, the acts are prescribed, which raises doubts about what measures to take. effective will be taken.
At the time, the head of the commission, Jean-Marc Sauvé, said the church had shown “deep, total and even cruel indifference for years”, choosing to turn a blind eye to the allegations and protect itself rather than defend the victims of abuse. systemic.
Ricard’s confession still has meaning beyond France. As a cardinal, he is eligible until age 80 to vote in a conclave to elect a future pope. According to the American The Wall Street Journal, citing the latest edition of the Vatican yearbook, he is also part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for disciplining clergy around the world against sexual abuse of minors.
Another of the investigated bishops is Michel Santier, whom Vatican authorities imposed sanctions in 2021 for “spiritual abuse resulting in ‘voyeurism’ to two adult men” in the 1990s. and victim groups.
On Monday, the Archbishop of Moulins-Beaufort apologized for what he called the dysfunctional way the Catholic Church in France handled the Santier case.
In total, ten former bishops are accused, eight of them for abuse, like Ricard and Santier, and two for not reporting the aggressions. The eleventh, Pierre Pican, died in 2018 and was convicted of failing to report the facts, according to the CEF (Conference Episcopal de France).
The 120 members of the CEF have been meeting since Thursday (3) in the French city of Lourdes to work on “concrete proposals” to improve communication and transparency about the canonical measures adopted against religious accused of sexual assault.
This Monday’s revelations bring to mind decisions taken by the Justice in recent years involving clerics accused of having committed sexual crimes. In 2020, a French appeals court overturned the conviction of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, then Archbishop of Lyon, for failing to report child sexual abuse allegedly committed by a priest he was responsible for.
The appeals court held that the cardinal was not obliged to report the allegation when he learned of it in 2014, as the victim was then an adult and capable of reporting it.
In 2019, a Vatican judgment found former US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick guilty of sexual abuse of minors and sexual misconduct with adults, but he denied any wrongdoing. McCarrick, 92, later removed from the priesthood, was charged in 2021 with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old in 1974. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In the face of the scandals, Pope Francis said last year that the scandal of sexual abuse in the church was a global catastrophe. At the time, the Vatican released the most comprehensive review of the institution’s laws in 40 years, tightening rules against sexual violence.
According to the new regulation, the abuse of minors must be punished with suspension or removal from the clerical office, since it represents an offense against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, which preaches chastity in words and deeds, with a minor or person “habitually imperfect in the use of reason”.
The same punishment applies to clerics who entice minors and vulnerable people to induce them “to expose themselves pornographically” and to religious who “acquire, retain, display or distribute” pornographic images.
Since being elected in 2013, Francis has taken steps to eradicate the sexual abuse of minors by clerics. In 2019, he issued a decree that made it mandatory for bishops and priests to report suspected sexual abuse and allowed anyone to submit reports to the Vatican. If bishops do not report abuse cases, they may be held responsible for the crime they concealed.
But critics accuse the pontiff of responding too slowly to the sex abuse scandals, lacking empathy for victims and blindly taking the word of his fellow clerics.
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