Multiple allegations of abuse have been made against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest and campaigner revered as a modern-day saint.
In July, the anti-poverty charity Emmaus, founded by Abbé Pierre, said It has heard allegations of sexual assault and harassment. from seven women and believe them.
Emmaus has now decided to remove Abbé Pierre from the organisation after 17 other women came forward to report their abuse by him.
The priest, who died in 2007 at the age of 94, regularly appeared in opinion polls as one of the most beloved Frenchmen of modern times for his tireless work for the poor and homeless.
The Emmaus movement, which he founded in 1949, operates in more than 40 countries. In France, his image in robes and beard has become a symbol of Christian sacrifice.
Now, following the second release of witness statements collected by Egaé, an independent consulting firm, the movement has decided to remove Abbé Pierre’s name from various of its organizations.
The Abbé Pierre Foundation will be renamed, while the board of Emmaus France will vote to remove the priest’s name from the foundation’s logo. The Abbé Pierre Centre in Esteville, Normandy, where he lived for many years and is buried, will close permanently.
A decision will also be made about what to do with hundreds of statues, busts and other images of the charity’s founder.
“We are in shock, very sad and very angry,” said Christophe Robert, head of the Abbé Pierre Foundation. “We give our full support to all the victims who have had the courage to speak out.”
The first blow came in July. as the Emmaus movement revealed allegations from seven women who said they were victims of sexual assault, mainly in the form of unwanted touching and kissing.
Seventeen women have since come forward, making complaints that are sometimes even more serious.
One woman – identified only as “J” by Egaé Consulting – said she was forced to perform oral sex on Abbé Pierre and made to watch him masturbate. “J” is now dead, but she has told her story to her daughter.
The consulting firm’s report also includes the experience of a woman named “M” who came to the priest in desperation in the 1990s, pleading for help finding a home.
“Their dozens of encounters were accompanied by forced kisses and touching of breasts. Abbé Pierre placed his hands on her (genitals) through her pants,” the report said.
Another allegation involves a girl, known only as “X”, who was just eight or nine years old when the priest allegedly abused her in the mid-1970s, touching her breasts and kissing her “with tongue”.
A staff member at the National Assembly, where Abbé Pierre served as a deputy from 1945 to 1951, was quoted as saying that “he behaved like a sexual predator, who attacked his female colleagues and had sex with them”.
Egaé’s report said there were many more accounts, but omitted those given anonymously or where the complainant did not want to disclose full details. The most recent complaints relate to when the priest was 92 years old.
The sudden fall of a modern icon – he was the subject of a biopic about the saint only last year – was greeted with less surprise than expected, as successive revelations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have seen.
What is more troubling for many is the growing evidence that colleagues at Emmaus – and within the Catholic Church – knew about Abbé Pierre’s sexual behavior, but did not speak up.
Partly because back then – the first attacks are believed to have occurred in the 1950s – such acts were not taken very seriously.
But as stories of Abbé Pierre’s unwanted pursuits became impossible to ignore, it appeared that the church and charity colluded to keep his name out of the press, and thus preserve his achievements for the poor and homeless.
Born Henri Grouès in 1912 in Lyon, Abbé Pierre was ordained a priest in 1938, taking a vow of chastity. He worked in the Resistance during World War II and became a household name in the winter of 1954 when he made a famous appeal on behalf of the homeless.
Church leaders learned of his predatory behavior the following year when he visited the United States and Canada and was asked to cut the trip short after women complained, according to an investigation by Le Monde newspaper.
After the 1954 appeal, “there were all sorts of admirers who wanted to pull a hair from his beard,” says biographer Pierre Lunel. “It was total hero worship. There were definitely sexual adventures at the time.”
In 1957, Abbé Pierre went to a clinic in Switzerland, ostensibly to recover from exhaustion but really to stay out of trouble. The church then required him to be accompanied by a “socius” – a church servant whose real job was to keep an eye on him.
In fact, from the 1960s onwards his relationship with the church became increasingly distant, while his charity grew into a large and complex organisation. For the next 40 years he remained a figurehead and a reference in France for humility and altruism.
Speaking on Monday, the head of Emmaus International, Adrien Caboche, confirmed that throughout that time, Abbé Pierre’s failure to keep his vow of chastity was no secret to those in the know.
“Of course we knew that Abbé Pierre had an emotional and sexual life. But we were all shocked by the violent aspect that has now been revealed.”
