A senior church body revealed on Monday that eleven current or past French bishops had been accused of sexual assault, including the former bishop of Bordeaux who has admitted to assaulting a minor 35 years ago.
Bishop of Bordeaux Jean-Pierre Ricard, who was named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016, has admitted to performing a ‘reprehensible’ act on a 14-year-old, Bishops’ Conference of France President Eric de Moulins-Beaufort told reporters.
De Moulins-Beaufort, the archbishop of north-eastern Reims, added that all of the accused will either face legal action or church discipline.
For their autumn conference, French bishops are gathering in Lourdes, southwest France, where they intend to examine methods to improve communication and transparency about historical charges of sex crimes against the clergy.
The results of an investigation that confirmed widespread abuse of minors by priests, deacons, and lay members of the Church beginning in the 1950s rocked the church last year.
It was found that over the previous seven decades, 216,000 minors had been abused by clergy, a figure that increased to 330,000 when claims against lay Church members, such as Catholic school teachers, were taken into account.
The report’s commission criticised the ‘systemic character’ of efforts to shield clergy from legal action and urged the Church to pay victims. In 2019, Ricard officially retired as the bishop of Bordeaux, but he is still a cardinal, which is often a position held for life.
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