Church knew of abuse claims against revered priest: researchers

Paris (AFP) – The Catholic Church already knew by 2021 of claims of sexual abuse against a beloved humanitarian French priest, the late Abbe Pierre, members of an independent commission said Saturday.

Abbe Pierre, or Henri Groues, was a Capuchin monk and an ordained Catholic clergyman who died in 2007 aged 94. He left a legacy as a friend to the poverty-stricken and founder of the charities Emmaus and the Abbe Pierre Foundation.

Revered for his uncompromising position defending the homeless and other people on the margins of life in France, he regularly topped polls as the most popular public figure in the country.

On Wednesday, however, it was revealed that seven women had made allegations of sexual assault or harassment by the elderly cleric dating back to between 1970 and 2005.

And on Saturday, four researchers for an independent commission into sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church said that they had already presented testimonies accusing the preacher to the Church in October 2021.

"Among the 1,200 or so testimonies processed by our team, three involved Abbe Pierre," the four researchers wrote in an article published in Le Monde.

One of those "very probably corresponds" to testimony B in the report published Wednesday, concerning events that took place in the early 1980s in Naumur, Belgium.

In that testimony, one woman accuses Groues of having groped her breast and inserted his tongue in her mouth.

'Criminal' acts

For the four researchers, the work of the two reports showed that "Abbe Pierre's sexual compulsion, which led to recidivist acts of assault, seems unmistakable".

Abbe Pierre "had committed acts that violated common civility and morality, criminal legislation and canonical precepts", they added.

Some 17 years after his death, Groues remains a familiar sight on charity shops posters and in metro stations urging French people to think of the poor.

He gave his inheritance away aged 18 to join the order of Capuchin monks, later becoming active in the Resistance to Nazi occupation and spending several post-war years as a member of parliament.

In 1949, he founded the Emmaus community that preaches self-help for excluded people, which has since spread to dozens of countries.

He was also a backer of the "Restos du coeur" soup kitchens movement and clashed with city authorities that failed to lodge the homeless.

The commission presented its findings to the French episcopate in October 2021. It estimated that over the past 70 years, around 330,000 people had been abused within the Church when they were minors.