Former provincial quits over cover-up

A former Swiss Capuchin Provincial has admitted to hushing up an abuse case and moving the abuser, one of whose victims has published his story in a book published last week for which Pope Francis wrote the preface.

Only a few days after the publication of Mon Père, je vous pardonne by Daniel Pittet from Fribourg in Switzerland, in which Pittet describes how he was sexually abused by a Capuchin priest, Joël Allaz, between 1968 and 1972, the former Capuchin Provincial in Switzerland, Ephrem Bucher, admitted to hushing up the Allaz abuse case and resigned from the Swiss bishops’ conference’s abuse investigation commission.

In the preface to the book, Pope Francis asked: “How can a priest in the service of Christ and his Church cause so much evil?”

Bucher, who has known Allaz since they were both young, was Capuchin Provincial from 2001 to 2004 and again from 2007 to 2013. He now admits that he should have reported Allaz to the police when the Church was alerted to his case in 1989.

Instead, he had him transferred to France as he feared Allaz would commit suicide. In France, however, Allaz went on to abuse his own nephew and another child. In 2012, he received a two-and-a half-year suspended sentence from a court in Grenoble.

However, he has never faced a trial in Switzerland and, aged 76, now lives in a Capuchin monastery in German-speaking Switzerland.

Only three months ago, Bucher was elected to the Swiss bishops’ conference’s seven-member Commission for Sexual Assault in the Church Environment. He did not consider the role he had played in the Allaz case as an objection because he was a “specialist on sexual abuse”, he said at the time.

When Bucher was elected to the Commission, “we were not aware of how far he was involved in the patchy investigation of Fr Joël’s case”, the president of the Swiss bishops’ conference, Bishop Charles Morerod, told the Swiss daily Blick on 17 February.

However, following the publication of Pittet’s book, Bucher was pressurised into resigning from the Commission.

The present Capuchin Pro­vin­cial in Switzerland, Agostino Del Pietro, has said that he intends to have the Pittet case investigated by an independent commission.