A senior church authority stated on Monday that eleven current or past French bishops have been accused of sexual abuse, including a cardinal who has admitted to sexually assaulting a minor more than three decades ago.
Bishop of Bordeaux Jean-Pierre Ricard, who was named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016, has acknowledged to performing a “reprehensible” act on a 14-year-old, Bishops’ Conference of France President Eric de Moulins-Beaufort told reporters.
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a priest, I behaved in a reprehensible way towards a girl of 14,” Ricard wrote in a message to the Conference read out by de Moulins-Beaufort.
“There is no doubt that my behaviour caused serious and long-lasting consequences for that person,” the cardinal said, adding that he had since asked the woman for forgiveness.
The public confession by Ricard, 78, was received “like a shock” by the Conference, de Moulins-Beaufort said.
All of the accused will face either prosecution or church disciplinary procedures, added de Moulins-Beaufort, the archbishop of the northeastern city of Reims.
French bishops are meeting in Lourdes in southwestern France for their autumn conference where they plan to discuss ways to improve their communication and transparency regarding historical sex crime allegations against the clergy.
The church was rocked last year by the findings of an inquiry that confirmed widespread abuse of minors by priests, deacons and lay members of the Church dating from the 1950s.
It was found that over the previous seven decades, 216,000 adolescents had been assaulted 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 protect clerics from legal action and recommended the Church to compensate victims.
In 2019, Ricard resigned as the bishop of Bordeaux, but he is still a cardinal, a position that is often retained for life.
