Charities set up by France’s most famous Catholic priest, Abbé Pierre, are distancing themselves from their founder following a fresh wave of sexual assault allegations against a man once best known for his fight against homelessness and poverty. Emmaus International – which has more than 400 organisations worldwide – announced Monday that it was looking into “some kind of compensation for victims” the same day that an investigation by Radio France raised questions about how long both the foundation and the Catholic Church had been covering up half a century of sexual abuse.
The late Capuchin monk, Catholic priest and campaigner for the homeless widely known as Abbé Pierre has been the literal face of charity for many people in France. For decades, the organisations that he helped to build, including the Abbé Pierre Foundation and the Emmaus movement, have put his name and face at the forefront of their calls for solidarity with those living in poverty and homelessness.
But speaking on French commercial radio on Monday, Emmaus International delegate-general Adrien Chaboche said that that image had now changed beyond recognition.
“From now on, Abbé Pierre – for everyone, and especially for the people that have been victims of violence – is the picture of a sexual predator,” he said.
Twenty-four women have so far come forward with allegations of sexual assault and harassment against the man born as Henri Grouès, accusing the once-celebrated priest of non-consensual kissing, forced fellatio, rape and sexual contact with children, including 17 new allegations released as part of a new report published on Friday.
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Since then, the Abbé Pierre Foundation, Emmaus France and Emmaus International have reiterated what they describe as their “total support” for the disgraced priest’s victims, and on Monday announced a series of measures in response to the ongoing revelations.
Emmaus announced that it was setting up a commission of independent experts to examine how Abbé Pierre had been allowed to abuse women and girls for more than half a century. The French Catholic bishop’s conference said that it “guaranteed its full cooperation with the work that it would be undertaking”. A contact and support facility set up by the two charities in July will continue to welcome further testimonies.
“Everything leads us to believe” that given the fact that “these acts were committed over such a long period of time, we still don’t know everything”, Chaboche said. “There are certainly other acts, we expect to hear other accounts. The hotline will remain open for now at least until the end of the year.”
Both charitable foundations are also taking steps to distance themselves from the once-revered priest, with the Abbé Pierre Foundation announcing it will be changing its name and Emmaus France permanently closing a memorial centre dedicated to its founder.
Fallen idol
It has taken 17 years for the allegations to come to light since Abbé Pierre’s death.
An independent report commissioned by Emmaus France and the Abbé Pierre Foundation and released in July this year detailed allegations of sexual assault and harassment from seven women from 1970 up until 2005 – just two years before the priest’s death. A second report from the Egaé consultancy on gender equality, commissioned by the foundations in July to collect further evidence, detailed 17 more allegations on Friday.
The story doesn’t seem to stop there. According to archive documents published by Radio France’s investigative team on Monday, Abbé Pierre has been at the heart of a series of sexual abuse scandals since the 1950s, notably during his time in Canada and the US.
Correspondence published by the radio station appears to show repeated efforts by members of both the Emmaus charity and the Catholic Church to keep the priest’s repeated sexual assaults and harassment of women from the public eye.
The report alleges that Abbé Pierre’s visit to the US was cut short following repeated complaints of sexual misconduct by women in New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. Speaking to Radio France, a former Emmaus staff member alleged that now-deceased Emmaus president Raymond Etienne had told him in 2017 that the organisation had been forced to keep the priest away from young women while he was travelling to prevent him from trying to grope their breasts.
Although the police became involved in September 1959 following complaints made while the priest was staying in an abbey in Quebec, the allegations remained hidden from the public. Sent back to France, Abbé Pierre defended himself in a letter to a Quebecois cardinal that he suspected had been told of the allegations against him.
“Everything in these accusations is false,” he wrote. “Nothing of this kind of misery ever existed, and has not existed, anywhere.”
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In 1963, French theologian André Paul also became aware of the accusations that had been levelled against Abbé Pierre during his stay in Canada.
“A Quebecois priest revealed to me that he had sexually assaulted women in Montreal,” he said. “That’s why he had to leave the country with express instructions never to return. The affair had been investigated by the police and the courts. The cardinal of Montreal intervened so that Abbé Pierre wasn’t prosecuted, on the condition that he never set foot in the country again.”
The mounting allegations against the deceased priest suggest a pattern of sexual violence against women and girls that would go on for more than 50 years.
Radio France interviewed a documentary filmmaker who had witnessed a conversation in the 1990s between Abbé Pierre and a young woman that took an abrupt and explicit turn.
“After a few seconds of conversation, Abbé Pierre asked the woman if she ever thought about him. A bit embarrassed, she responded that yes, she did,” the filmmaker said. “And Abbé Pierre followed up by asking her, “Do you touch yourself when you think about me?”
Identity crisis
Faced with this cascade of allegations, the charities he set up are distancing themselves from their founder.
“We are deeply disappointed and in disbelief over the fact that a man who had so well understood the challenges of human dignity and carried strong values of humanity and solidarity could show himself to be so catastrophically disastrous and violent in his relationship to women,” Emmaus International’s Chaboche said on Monday.
Since the revelations, he said, portraits of the association’s founder had been removed from its headquarters and discussions would have to take place about changing the logo of the Abbé Pierre Foundation in addition to its name. There may also be changes made to Emmaus France’s articles of association, which include the mention of “founder Abbé Pierre”.
The charity also announced the permanent closure of a memorial centre dedicated to Abbé Pierre in Esteville in France’s northeast, where the priest is buried.
“It’s not about getting rid of everything. We’re very aware of everything that Abbé Pierre has done, of what we owe him as a movement, and how he knew how to mobilise public opinion towards sharing and solidarity,” Chaboche said.
“What we’re changing today is the way in which we, as a movement, present ourselves to the world. The victims, but also the donors and our supporters around the world, would not understand if everything went on exactly as before after a revelation of this nature.”
On Monday, the town of Nancy announced it was removing a commemorative plaque that had been put up seven months earlier in honour of Abbé Pierre. The municipal government justified the decision by citing the many accounts of sexual assault by the disgraced priest.
“Given these grave revelations, the municipality of Nancy has decided to permanently take down the plaque dedicated to the memory of Abbé Pierre,” a press release said.
Making amends
Emmaus International is also “reflecting” on what form compensation for the priest’s victims should take, Chaboche said Monday.
“It’s a very important question, and one that we’re still working on, one that we’re still reflecting on at the moment,” he said. “It’s a process that takes a little bit of time.”
In light of the new revelations, Sister Veronique Margron, president of the Conference of Monks and Nuns of France, called on Saturday for the creation of a “process of justice, of recognition, of reparation” similar to that put in place following a 2021 report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church.
The charities’ response to the revelations has been welcomed by a number of organisations active in the fight against sexual violence against women.
Green party MP Sandrine Rousseau, known for her feminist activism, posted in July that the foundations had been “brave to have laid things out so transparently”.
“The way in which Emmaus decided to confront this question will mark a turning point,” said Caroline de Haas, co-founder of the Egaé consultancy. “It’s never happened before that a structure has faced up to the issue of sexual violence committed by someone within its ranks in such a determined and transparent manner.”
What’s next?
Abbé Pierre died in 2007 and will never face a legal reckoning. The statute of limitations has also run out on most of the most of the accusations – in France, adult rape survivors have 20 years to initiate legal proceedings, and those who were underage at the time of their assault have 30.
Nevertheless, following the release of the second report on Friday, a number of associations have called for legal action. Speaking on the franceinfo news channel, Arnaud Gallais, the cofounder of children’s rights NGO Mouv’Enfants, said that it was “scandalous that the justice system would stay silent”, calling for public prosecutors to take matters into their own hands in the name of “dignity for the victims”.
People have also asked just how much these charitable organisations, their members and their directors knew about the allegations against Abbé Pierre over the years, and what they did – or didn’t do – to keep women and girls safe.
“How is it possible that Abbé Pierre was able to act in this way from the 1950s right up until the 2000s without anyone saying anything?” Abbé Pierre Foundation director-general Christophe Robert asked Saturday on France 5 television.
The disgraced priest “couldn’t have hidden it, there must be dozens of people who saw”, Sister Margron told the French daily Le Parisien.
“If the institutions had been working, there would not have been so many victims,” she said.
This article has been adapted from the original in French.
