PARIS (FRANCE)
Yahoo! [Sunnyvale CA]
September 6, 2024
By Marine PENNETIER
At least 17 more people have made accusations of sexual violence against a French monk who became a household name for his charity work, according to a report published Friday, prompting his charities to distance themselves from their founder.
A Capuchin monk since 1932 and an ordained Catholic clergyman since 1938, Abbe Pierre died in 2007 aged 94.
Born Henri Groues, Abbe Pierre left behind a legacy as a friend to the poverty-stricken and founder of the charities Emmaus and the Abbe Pierre Foundation.
With his once saintly image already shaken by allegations of sexual abuse in July, the latest claims prompted his foundation to announce it will change its name and the Emmaus charity he also founded to announce the permanent closure of a memorial to the priest.
Friday’s allegations range from non-consensual touching of women’s breasts to “kissing by force”, “repeated sexual contact with a vulnerable person”, “repeated penetrative sex acts” and even “sexual contact with a child”, the report said.
Specialist consultancy Egae was hired by the Abbe Pierre Foundation and Emmaus in July to gather further testimony about their founder, after a first battery of allegations shocked the nation.
They found evidence of abuse dating from the 1950s into the 2000s, taking place mostly in France but also in the United States, Morocco and Switzerland.
Those who testified are current or former volunteers at Emmaus, workers in places where Abbe Pierre stayed, members of families with close ties to the priest or people he met at public events, Egae said.
– ‘Forced’ –
Some 17 years after his death, Groues until July remained a familiar sight on charity shop 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.
In Friday’s report, “some women were speaking for the first time about what happened to them, reliving the events even as they told their stories,” Caroline De Haas, associate director of Egae, told AFP.
One had written in a letter to France’s committee investigating sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that she had been “forced to watch Abbe Pierre masturbate and to perform oral sex in a Paris apartment” in 1989.
The family of another woman, who has since died, said she was “forced to masturbate” Abbe Pierre in the Moroccan capital Rabat in 1956.
A third woman said she endured “forcible kisses” and “contact” when she was eight to nine years old in 1974-75.
And a fourth reported forced physical contact while Abbe Pierre was serving as an MP in France’s National Assembly in 1951.
– ‘Total support for victims’ –
France’s Catholic bishops’ conference (CEF) on Friday expressed “horror” in a statement about the new allegations, highlighting the “extremely serious” claims about “sexual assault against underage young girls”.
The Abbe Pierre Foundation and Emmaus reiterated their “total support for victims” in a statement, hailing the “courage” of those who had come forward.
Beyond changing the Abbe Pierre Foundation’s name and closing Emmaus’ memorial to the founder, they will also set up an independent committee “to explain the failings that allowed Abbe Pierre to act as he did for more than 50 years”, they said.
Abbe Pierre’s public persona as a friend to the destitute was “a matter of historic fact”, the charities added, whereas “we are now faced with the unbearable pain he inflicted”.
The two organisations will maintain until the end of the year a contact and support facility set up in July for any more victims who wish to come forward.
by Marine PENNETIER