11 French bishops accused of sexual abuse, Catholic Church says

“I behaved in a reprehensible way,” Ricard, 78, wrote in a confession letter read during a news 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 he has maintained the title of cardinal. Earlier this year, he was appointed to temporarily supervise the Roman Catholic Foyers de charité organization, which was undertaking reforms after being rocked by a series of sexual abuse scandals.

Monday’s revelations — which came as church officials met at an annual French conference — are “shocking, but not surprising,” said Zach Hiner, executive director of SNAP, a network of church abuse victims.

Wherever independent commissions or church officials have looked for evidence of sexual abuse over the past decades, they have tended to find cases on a stunning scale.

Last year, a report from an independent French commission found that French Catholic clerics 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

“One doesn’t get to those kinds of levels without there being significant problems at the very top,” said Hiner, who said abuse accusations against “people at the highest levels of the Catholic Church” have proliferated.

Last year’s independent commission report in France gathered more than 6,000 testimonies, including from victims and witnesses, and several cases were subsequently forwarded to law enforcement officials.

Moulins-Beaufort said Monday that at least some of the 11 bishops who have been accused of abuse will be investigated by state authorities, along with parallel church investigations. But in cases where the window of prosecution has passed, internal probes are the only options.

Among victims organizations, those internal procedures have prompted calls for greater transparency.

“It can be rather opaque,” said Hiner, criticizing cases in which bishops were punished by the church “but without much information given to parishioners and the public as to why.”