PARIS (FRANCE)
Associated Press
July 3, 2019
One of a half-dozen men who have accused the Vatican’s ambassador to France of groping them is taking his complaint directly to the Vatican after claiming the Holy See had invoked diplomatic immunity in a French criminal probe.
Mathieu De La Souchere met with one of Pope Francis’s sex abuse advisers on Wednesday after filing a police report in Paris earlier this year. He accused Archbishop Luigi Ventura of touching his buttocks repeatedly in public, during an official reception Jan. 17 at Paris city hall, where he is an employee.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into alleged sexual aggression. The Vatican said Ventura was cooperating with the investigation. But De La Souchere said the French case was essentially stalled over the immunity question.
“The French government’s request to the Vatican to lift the diplomatic immunity remained unanswered,” he told The Associated Press.
His lawyer plans to file the complaint with the Vatican City State’s criminal tribunal next week. The tribunal largely follows the Italian penal code and is separate from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse-related crimes under the Catholic Church’s canon law.
“This new judicial step here in the Vatican we hope will be one more step toward the trial that all the victims in France are waiting for,” De La Souchere said after meeting with Father Hans Zollner, a founding member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
De La Souchere met with Zollner and another man who has accused Ventura. Crux has reported as many as a half-dozen men have accused Ventura of unwanted groping over the course of his diplomatic postings, which have included Canada and Chile.
Ventura’s whereabouts are unknown, but he attended a meeting of all the Holy See’s apostolic nuncios, or ambassadors, at the Vatican last month. His lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said Ventura “has fully and voluntarily cooperated with French judicial authorities who are in charge of his case, and will continue to do so.”
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