PARIS (FRANCE)
The Spectator [London, England]
January 19, 2025
By Gavin Mortimer
This week nine more charges of sexual abuse were levelled against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest who for decades was regarded as a modern-day saint.
This brings to 33 the number of charges, ranging from sexual assault to the rape of a boy, all alleged to have been committed between the 1960s and shortly before the priest’s death in 2007 at the age of 94. Among the latest complainants are a woman now 58, who detailed how she was assaulted by Abbé Pierre exactly fifty years ago. ‘Several times I’ve wanted to shout to the world that this man isn’t who he says he is,’ the woman said in an interview this week. ‘But who would have believed me? People weren’t ready to hear that about Abbé Pierre.’
The priest – whose real name was Henri Grouès – is reported to have been a voracious sexual predator, who indulged his perversion around the world in hotels, hospitals, airplanes, youth camps and when was engaged on humanitarian missions.
The first revelations from seven eye-witnesses were published last July, followed by 17 further cases in a report issued in September.
‘We are in a state of shock, very hurt and very angry,’ said the head of the Abbé Pierre Foundation in September. ‘We extend our fullest support to all the victims who have had the courage to speak out.’
The Foundation dropped the priest’s name from its title as a result of the revelations and the Emmaus anti-poverty charity, which Abbé Pierre founded in 1949 – and which operates in more than 40 countries – has also airbrushed him from its history. Across France, streets named in his honour have been rechristened and street art on which his face appeared have been erased.
Following the latest revelations, France’s Conference of Bishops issued a statement in which they expressed their ‘horror’ at the priest’s alleged crimes. ‘To realise that he used his media aura and the social work he had built…to sexually abuse women, children and people in precarious situations is appalling.’
The true number of his victims is believed to be in the hundreds but many are now dead and others too ashamed or frightened to come forward. A lot were vulnerable women and children, who went to the priest for help and were raped or assaulted.
The BBC reported on the scandal last year and stated that there is ‘growing evidence’ that many people were aware of Abbé Pierre’s depravity but said nothing. ‘Partly this was because in these earlier times – the first alleged assaults were in the 1950s – such actions were not treated very seriously,’ said the BBC.
That is one reason. But there is another more disturbing explanation as to why Abbé Pierre was able to get away with his sexual abuse for so long: he was a figurehead of the social revolution that swept France in 1968, the bourgeois Socialist students whose motto was ‘It is forbidden to forbid’.
Jimmy Savile created an alter ago while he committed his monstrous crimes in the same period, that of the tireless charity worker who ran marathons for good causes and volunteered as a porter at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
Virtue was also the modus operandi of Abbé Pierre. Anti-nuclear and anti-colonialist, he was champion of the homeless in the decades after the war and towards the end of the century he became a powerful voice for migrants.
His bete noire was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, whose views on mass immigration were diametrically opposed to Abbé Pierre’s. The priest appeared on television on more than one occasion to order Le Pen to ‘shut his mouth’ and desist from warning of the dangers of mass immigration. It reinforced the priest’s reputation as a darling of the progressive left.
Virtue was the modus operandi of Abbé Pierre
There was, however, one area of common ground for Le Pen and Abbé Pierre, and that was their anti-Semitism.
In a 1991 interview with the Catholic magazine, Life, Abbé Pierre questioned Israel’s right to exist. Two years later he gave another interview to two authors for a book on which they working. During the discussion, Abbé Pierre said there had been no holocaust during the war; rather he accused Joshua, the leader of the Israelite tribes who conquered Canaan, as the instigator of a holocaust. ‘We were very embarrassed,’ said the authors later. ‘If the most popular man in France says bad things about the Jews, that’s authorising the whole of France to think: “maybe it’s true”.’ The authors omitted Abbé Pierre’s anti-Semitism from their book.
In 1996 the priest offered vociferous support to his good friend Roger Garaudy. The communist turned Islamist was at the time on trial for Holocaust denial, and Pierre was quoted as saying the holocaust had been ‘exaggerated’. He also renewed his attack on Israel, describing the country as ‘suicidal’ and criticising their policy towards Palestine.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was asked for this thoughts on Abbé Pierre’s endorsement of a holocaust denier and said he didn’t want to get involved in a ‘tricky debate’ as it would probably end with him in court. However, he did repeat his assertion, first made in an interview in 1987, that while he did not deny the existence of the gas chambers, they were a ‘detail’ of the second world war.
Le Pen was convicted on multiple occasions for contesting crimes against humanity, the last occasion in 2016 after having once more insisted that the gas chambers were a ‘detail’.
No charges were ever brought against Abbé Pierre for similar claims. On the contrary when he died in 2007, France’s Human Rights League – who had taken Le Pen to court more than once – lauded the priest as ‘a fellow fighter for the respect of all rights for all…through his refusal of misery and his support for the most disadvantaged, the undocumented’.
A few of his victims did speak out, such as the woman who was filmed in 2007 recounting the day she was assaulted by the priest in the 1980s. The filmmaker heard similar accounts from two other women but his documentary was rejected by every broadcaster. ‘At the time, the omerta was total,’ said the filmmaker, Patrick Charles-Messance, this week. ‘He was an icon, and you don’t touch icons.’