The Washington Post - Reuters April 17, 2010
John Paul backed praise for hiding abuse: Cardinal
By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - A former Vatican cardinal who congratulated a French bishop for hiding a sexually abusive priest has said he acted with the approval of the late Pope John Paul, a Spanish newspaper reported on Saturday.
Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the Vatican official in charge of priests around the world when he praised the French bishop in 2001, dragged the Polish pope into the controversy during a conference in the Spanish city of Murcia.
His comment came after a Vatican spokesman indirectly confirmed that a 2001 letter to the bishop posted on a French website on Thursday was authentic and was proof the Vatican was right to tighten up its procedures on sex abuse cases that year.
By invoking John Paul, Castrillon Hoyos appeared to up the ante in a subtle Vatican power struggle over who was to blame for past failures to deal effectively with the abuse cases whose revelations in recent months have shaken the Church.
"After consulting the pope ... I wrote a letter to the bishop congratulating him as a model of a father who does not hand over his sons," the daily La Verdad quoted Castrillon Hoyos as telling the conference on Friday, to a round of applause from the assembled prelates, priests and lay people.
"The Holy Father authorized me to send this letter to all bishops in the world and publish it on the internet."
CARDINAL CLAIMS NO COVER UP
Castrillon Hoyos, a Colombian who retired from Vatican service last year, argued on CNN's Spanish-language television last week that temporarily suspending abusive priests and then quietly reassigning them elsewhere was not a cover-up.
Castrillon Hoyos's letter, written in French in 2001, praised Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux-Lisieux for not denouncing a French priest who was later sentenced to 18 years in jail for the repeated rape of a boy and sexual assaults on 10 others.
Pican, who received a suspended three-month jail sentence for not denouncing sexual abuse of minors, admitted in court he had kept Rev. Rene Bissey in parish work despite the fact the priest had privately admitted committing pedophile acts.
The case shocked France and prompted its bishops to declare that all abuse cases must be reported to civil authorities.
"I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," Castrillon Hoyos wrote in his letter to Pican.
At the Murcia conference, the cardinal said that Pican did not denounce Bissey because the priest had told sins in the confessional, where secrecy is respected under the law.
At his trial, Pican said Bissey admitted his abuse in a private conversation, which would not enjoy legal protection.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/17/AR2010041702066.html
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French priest accused of sexual assaults 17 years after death
ReplyDeleteby Robert Plummer, BBC News July 18, 2024
French Roman Catholic priest Abbé Pierre, remembered as a champion of the homeless, has been accused of sexual assault 17 years after his death.
One of France's most revered figures, Abbé Pierre died in January 2007, aged 94.
But now the country has been shocked by allegations that he sexually assaulted or harassed seven women between 1970 and 2005.
The news was broken by the Emmaus anti-poverty movement which he founded. The organisation said it had heard testimony from the seven women and it believed them.
"These revelations have shaken our organisations, where the figure of Abbé Pierre plays a major role," the charity said in a statement on its website.
"We all know his story and his message. These acts profoundly change the way we regard this man, who was known above all for his struggle against poverty, destitution and exclusion."
The scandal represents an extraordinary posthumous fall from grace for the priest, who repeatedly topped national popularity polls during his lifetime.
His movement had an international impact, with Emmaus hostels in dozens of countries.
When he died in 2007, the president at the time, Jacques Chirac, said that France had lost "an immense figure, a conscience, an incarnation of goodness".
Emmaus said it began investigating the allegations a year ago, when it received "a first-hand account from a woman who was subjected to sexual assault by Abbé Pierre".
After that, it commissioned an outside firm to pursue the inquiry. This uncovered incidents involving six other women, one of whom was under 18 at the time.
"It is reasonable to consider that other people were affected, although it is difficult to estimate how many," Emmaus said.
The charity paid tribute to the "courage" of the women who had spoken out and made it possible to bring the events to light.
"We believe them, we know that these intolerable acts have left their mark and we stand by them," it added.
The revelations were splashed across the front pages of Thursday's French press, with commentators expressing astonishment that such a respected figure had, as Le Parisien put it, fallen from his pedestal.
Left-wing newspaper Libération saw the scandal as part of the dissipation of the Catholic Church's "long vow of silence" about sexual abuse, adding that before the advent of the MeToo movement, the women's allegations would have gone unheard.
Emmaus said it had set up a confidential system for gathering testimonies from people who had experienced or witnessed "unacceptable behaviour" by Abbé Pierre and invited them to come forward.
It said they would be provided with guidance and support.
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New abuse allegations emerge against once-venerated French priest
ReplyDeleteby Hugh Schofield, BBC Paris correspondent September 9, 2024
More abuse allegations have been made against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest and campaigner who was long venerated as a modern-day saint.
In July, the Emmaus anti-poverty charity which Abbé Pierre founded said it had heard allegations of sexual assault and harassment from seven women and it believed them.
Emmaus has now decided to expunge Abbé Pierre from the organisation after 17 more women spoke out about having suffered abuse at his hands.
The priest, who died in 2007 aged 94, used to regularly appear in polls as one of the most popular French people of modern times because of his tireless work for the poor and homeless.
The Emmaus movement, which he founded in 1949, operates in more than 40 countries. In France, his caped and bearded figure became an emblem of Christian self-sacrifice.
Now, following a second release of witness statements gathered by Egaé, an independent consultancy, the movement has decided to remove Abbé Pierre’s name from its various organisations.
The Abbé Pierre Foundation is to be retitled, while the board of Emmaus France is to vote on removing the priest’s name from its logo. The Abbé Pierre Centre in Esteville in Normandy, where he lived for many years and is buried, is to close for good.
A decision will also be taken on how to dispose of hundreds of statuettes, busts and other images of the charity’s creator.
“We are in a state of shock, very hurt and very angry,” said Christophe Robert, who heads the Abbé Pierre Foundation. “We extend our fullest support to all the victims who have had the courage to speak out.”
A first blow fell in July when the Emmaus movement revealed allegations made by seven women, who said they had been victims of sexual aggression mainly in the form of breast-touching and unwanted kisses.
The 17 women who have come forward since have made claims that are in some cases more serious.
One woman – designated as "J" by the Egaé consultancy – said she had been forced to give oral sex to Abbé Pierre, and made to watch him masturbate. "J" is now dead but she told her story to her daughter.
The consultancy's report also includes the experience of woman named as "M" who in the 1990s came to the priest in distress, asking for help to find a home.
“Their dozen or so meetings were always accompanied by forced kisses and breast-touching. Abbé Pierre put his hand on her (private parts) though her trousers,” according to the report.
Another charge relates to a girl, designated "X", who was only eight or nine years old when the priest allegedly abused her in the mid-1970s, touching her chest and kissing her “with his tongue.”
continued below
A staff-member at the National Assembly, where Abbé Pierre was a deputy from 1945 to 1951, is quoted as saying that “he behaved like a sexual predator, who assaulted his female colleagues and had sexual relations with them.”
ReplyDeleteThe Egaé report said that there were many more accounts, but it had left out those which were given anonymously or where the complainants were reluctant to reveal full details. The most recent claims relate to when the priest was 92.
The sudden fall of a modern-day icon – only last year he was the subject of a hagiographic biopic – has been greeted with less surprise than might have been expected. Successive revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have seen to that.
More perplexing to many is growing evidence that colleagues in Emmaus – and in the Catholic Church – were aware of Abbé Pierre’s sexual behaviour, but failed to speak out.
Partly this was because in these earlier times – the first alleged assaults were in the 1950s – such actions were not treated very seriously.
But when stories of Abbé Pierre’s unwanted advances became impossible to ignore, it seems certain that church and charity colluded to keep his name out of the press, and thus preserve his achievement for the poor and homeless.
Born Henri Grouès in 1912 in Lyon, Abbé Pierre was ordained in 1938, taking a vow of chastity. He worked in the Resistance in World War Two, and became a household name in the winter of 1954 when he made a famous appeal on behalf of the homeless.
According to an investigation by Le Monde newspaper, church hierarchy learned of his predatory behaviour the following year when, on a visit to US and Canada, he was asked to cut the trip short because of complaints from women.
Biographer Pierre Lunel said that after the 1954 appeal “there were groupies of every kind who just wanted to pull out a hair of his beard. It was total hero-worship. At that point there were definitely sexual adventures.”
In 1957 Abbé Pierre went to a clinic in Switzerland, ostensibly to recover from exhaustion but in reality to keep him out of trouble. After that the church insisted he be accompanied by a "socius" – a church helper whose real job was to keep an eye on him.
In fact from the 1960s his relations with the church grew more distant, while his charity became a large and complex organisation. For the next 40 years he remained as a figurehead, and a reference in France for humility and self-giving.
Speaking on Monday, the head of Emmaus International, Adrien Caboche, confirmed that throughout that time Abbé Pierre’s non-observance of his vow of chastity had been no secret to those in the know.
“We were aware of course that Abbé Pierre had an emotional and a sexual life. But we were all stunned by the violent aspect which has now been revealed.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d1z4lpqpno