Abbé Pierre, the well-known Capuchin monk, Catholic priest, and advocate for the homeless, has become a symbol of charity for numerous French individuals.
The Abbé Pierre Foundation and the Emmaus movement, organisations that he contributed to building, have prominently featured his name and face in their appeals for solidarity with individuals facing poverty and homelessness.
During an interview on French commercial radio on Monday, Adrien Chaboche, the delegate-general of Emmaus International, mentioned that the perception had transformed significantly.
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“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 individuals who identify as women have currently made claims of sexual assault and harassment against the individual known by birth as Henri Grouès. These accusations involve the former esteemed priest engaging in non-consensual kissing, compelled fellatio, rape, and sexual interactions with minors. A total of 17 additional allegations were disclosed as a component of a fresh report that was issued on Friday.
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 has declared the establishment of a group of unbiased professionals to investigate how Abbé Pierre was able to mistreat women and girls for over 50 years. The French Catholic bishop’s conference affirmed its complete cooperation with the investigative work. The contact and support center established by the two organizations in July will keep receiving additional 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.
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.”
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?”
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.
Following the disclosures, he mentioned that the organization had taken down portraits of its founder from the main office and indicated that there would be conversations about altering the logo and name of the Abbé Pierre Foundation. Additionally, there may be modifications to Emmaus France’s articles of association, which currently refer to the “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.
