French church knew about abuse allegations against revered priest: researcher | National

The Catholic Church was already aware of allegations of sexual abuse against a popular, humanitarian French priest, the late Abbé Pierre, in 2021, members of an independent commission said on Saturday.

Abbe Pierre, or Henri Groues, was a Capuchin friar and ordained Catholic priest who died in 2007 at the age of 94. He left a legacy to those affected by poverty as a friend and founder of the charities Emmaus and the Abbe Pierre Foundation.

He is revered for his uncompromising commitment to the homeless and other people on the margins of society in France and regularly tops polls as the most popular public figure in the country.

On Wednesday, however, it was revealed that seven women had accused the elderly clergyman of sexual assault and harassment between 1970 and 2005.

And on Saturday, four researchers from an independent commission on sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church said they had already submitted witness statements containing allegations against the preacher to the church in October 2021.

“Among the approximately 1,200 testimonies that our team analyzed, three concerned Abbe Pierre,” the four researchers wrote in an article published in Le Monde.

One of them is “very likely to be consistent” with statement B in the report published on Wednesday and concerns events that took place in Naumur, Belgium, in the early 1980s.

In this statement, a woman accuses Groues of groping her breasts and putting his tongue in her mouth.

– “Criminal acts –

For the four researchers, their work on the two reports showed that “Abbé Pierre’s sexual coercion, which led to repeated assaults, seems unmistakable.”

Abbe Pierre had “committed acts that violate common courtesy and morality, criminal law and canon law,” they added.

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

At the age of 18, he gave away his inheritance and joined the Capuchin order. He later became involved in the resistance against the Nazi occupation and was a member of parliament for several years after the war.

In 1949, he founded the Emmaus Community, which preaches self-help for marginalized people and has since spread to dozens of countries.

He also supported the soup kitchen movement “Restos du coeur” and clashed with city authorities who refused to house the homeless.

The commission presented its findings to the French episcopate in October 2021. It estimates that around 330,000 people have been abused as minors within the church over the past 70 years.

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