Comment PARIS — Eight former French bishops have been accused of sexual abuse and three others of failing to report abuse, the French bishops’ conference announced Monday, signaling that some high-ranking Catholic Church officials not only turned a blind eye for decades, but may have been the same perpetrators. Among those under investigation was Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, the former head of the French bishops’ conference, who admitted abusing a 14-year-old girl when he was a priest 35 years ago. “I behaved in a reprehensible way,” Ricard, 78, wrote in a letter of confession read during a press conference by Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, the current president of the bishops’ conference. Ricard retired in 2019 after nearly two decades as archbishop of Bordeaux, but has retained the title of cardinal. He was appointed this year to temporarily oversee the Roman Catholic organization Foyers de Charité, which has made changes following sex-abuse scandals. Monday’s revelations — which came as church officials met for an annual conference — are “shocking, but not surprising,” said Zach Hiner, executive director of SNAP, a network of victims of church abuse. Some of the allegations were already well known, and where independent commissions or church officials have looked for evidence of sexual abuse in recent decades, they have tended to find cases on a staggering scale. Last year, a report by an independent French commission found that French Catholic priests had abused more than 200,000 minors over the past 70 years. The report estimated the number of perpetrators to be at least 3,000. Catholic clergy in France likely abused more than 200,000 minors, independent commission estimates “You don’t get to these levels without significant problems at the top,” said Hiner, who said abuse allegations against “people at the highest levels of the Catholic Church” have multiplied. Last year’s report by the independent commission in France gathered more than 6,000 testimonies, including victims and witnesses, and several cases were referred to law enforcement officials. Moulin-Beaufort said Monday that at least some of the accused bishops will be investigated or investigated by state authorities, along with parallel church investigations. But in cases where the prosecution window has closed, internal investigations are the only options. Among victims’ organizations, these internal processes have prompted calls for greater transparency. “It can be rather opaque,” Hiner said, criticizing cases in which bishops have been disciplined by the church “but without much information given to parishioners and the public as to why.”
