Complicated cases of clerical sexual abuse and reported episcopal mismanagement surfaced in France last week, adding to what seems to be an unending series of enquiries and embarrassments plaguing the French Church.
It began on 13 June when three Catholic publications – La Croix, La Vie and Famille Chrétienne – jointly reported the Paris prosecutor had opened a preliminary enquiry into an alleged case of sexual aggression by La Rochelle Bishop Georges Colomb in 2013, when he was head of the Foreign Missions of Paris (MEP) missionary group.
Colomb promptly denied the charge and asked the Vatican to step aside but retain his title while defending himself against the accuser, who said he was too ashamed to report the case soon after it happened.
Strasbourg Auxiliary Bishop Gilles Reithinger, who was MEP vicar general back then, was accused of hushing up the Colomb case. He was informed about it soon afterwards by the accuser, a personal friend, but later said the case did not seem serious to him.
Both men were also implicated in the case of Fr Aymeric de Salvert, a former MEP missionary in Japan sent home in 2011 because of a gay relationship. After several years under Colomb at MEP headquarters in Paris, he was sent under Reithinger, MEP head since 2016, to Angers diocese. This April, the Angers prosecutor named Salvert in an enquiry into aggravated rape in 2014 and the priest was suspended from ministry.
A further twist came last year when an expatriate Frenchman accused another French MEP priest in Japan of rape in 2022 and filed a civil case in France against him. The priest mentioned unreported ties to Bishop Reithinger. Soon it became known there were canonical enquiries against both Colomb and Reithinger.
La Vie quoted an unnamed psychotherapist as finding a pattern of priests grooming victims in the three cases. Today’s MEP leaders recently began a full study of abuse cases since 1950 in the society, founded in 1663 to evangelise Asia.
Both Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the bishops’ conference, and Poitiers Archbishop Pascal Wintzer, metropolitan for the western French region including La Rochelle, stressed in careful statements that accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The MEP mess was not the only new problem facing French bishops. Angoulême Bishop Hervé Gosselin. who was spiritual director of a Foyer de Charité near Dinan in Brittany from 2003 to 2016, was accused by news website Mediapart of covering up cases of sexual violence reported by female members of the lay religious movement.
Mediapart said Gosselin denied knowledge of dozens of cases under his predecessor and mentor Fr André-Marie van der Borght and played down complaints brought to him since then. Several cases were reported to the bishops conference and even to Rome.
AFP reported on 16 June that retired Bishop Michel Dubost, the papal delegate for the Foyer, had launched an study by leading theologians and sociologists into possible “theological deviations” in the group. There are 78 foyers on four continents, giving retreats for over 50,000 Catholics a year.
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