The Catholic Church in France has been operating a system under which priests suspected of sex abuse have been discreetly relocated to other parishes, given other jobs, sent abroad or put on sabbatical leave in a bid to avoid public scandal, Mediapart can reveal. The practice was unearthed following a Mediapart investigation into the case of Father Jean-Marc Desperon, who was placed under formal investigation for child sex abuse on April 23rd this year. Twenty years ago Desperon had been moved from his parish in the Croix-Rousse area of Lyon in eastern France to a rural parish north of Toulouse, in the diocese of Montauban. Officially the move was so that the priest could look after his sick father. Unofficially it followed the first alerts from parents that the priest had a strong psychological hold over their children, concerns that were flagged right up to archbishop level.
The church, however, did not report their concerns to the judicial authorities, even though Father Jean-Marc Desperon re-offended, abusing a minor from the Toulouse region in 2005. Indeed, although he had been alerted on several occasions about the danger posed by the priest, the archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, only removed Father Jean-Marc Desperon from religious duties after a report by Mediapart on April 15th. Until then he had still been in the 2016 directory for the Catholic diocese in Lyon where Desperon was listed under the heading “extra-diocesan ministry”.
Mediapart subsequently discovered that far from being a one-off, the Desperon case is just one example of how the Lyon diocese and the Catholic Church in France in general have been quietly relocating their priests once they have become the subject of child abuse rumours and complaints. Though there are no written rules governing it, the practice has been carried out with a regularity that is almost systematic. Priests Desperon, Preynat and others from the Lyon area who have been accused of sexual abuse while under the overall responsibility of Cardinal Barbarin have all been “put out to pasture” at one time or other in their clerical careers.
Moreover, the judicial authorities have not been informed of the allegations made against these priests, even though according to a 2001 decree under Pope Jean Paul II they should have been. “The practice, always, is to move [people],” says Christian Terras, editor of the progressive Catholic weekly Golias, which has revealed a number of paedophile cases. “There is a moment of penitence, of being withdrawn for six months or a year, then they turn the page and put you back on the parish circuit.”
The majority of French dioceses are involved in the practice. While precise methods may vary slightly from diocese to diocese, the overall approach varies very little. As soon as the first complaints emerge the priest suspected of sexual abuse takes “sabbatical leave” and undergoes penitence so the affair is forgotten. He is then moved geographically to another area or to a different job. He is left isolated and some distance away in a new parish, often in the countryside, or moved to a new diocese altogether, even sent abroad. The priest might equally be placed temporarily in posts where he has no contact with children, such as an archivist, a trainer of other priests or as a chaplain working with the elderly.
But these moves only last a while, a few months or a year at most. Whether they have been convicted or not, the priest is often reintegrated as a priest in a new French parish, celebrating first communions and baptisms. Sometimes they are even promoted, as was the case with Father Bernard Preynat in Lyon, who was nominated as a dean by Cardinal Barbarin in 2013. Mediapart also discovered that Father Dominique Spina had become head of seven parishes near Toulouse having been jailed for five years for rape. The past is forgiven, forgotten and hidden away in parish records or buried in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body charged with defending doctrine and morals at the Vatican.
In the absence of formal legal complaints it can often take years, even decades, for the justice system finally to get called in. The statute of limitations then helps the church or local bishops, as many of the offences cannot be prosecuted so many years after the event, as is the case in the Preynat affair. “In the Catholic Church there is a transcendent justice that is higher than human justice. That's what happened between Barbarin and Preynat. In the name of pardon and mercy, the two came to an arrangement,” says Christian Terras.
The case of Bernard Preynat, the paedophile priest from Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, who according to a tally made by the association La Parole Libérée abused 68 victims between 1970 and 1991, is indeed emblematic of this silent system of priestly relocation which operates inside the Catholic Church in France. In 1991 the diocese of Lyon was alerted by a mother whose child, then aged ten, was abused by Father Preynat at the Saint-Luc Scouts group. She threatened to inform the judicial authorities if nothing was done. The priest was then moved from Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon in February 1991 and initially sent to stay with a religious order of nuns. For the next 25 years his victims would hear no more of 'Father Bernard'.
However, the priest did not vanish from the Church, instead he was to be discreetly despatched to rural parishes in the Lyon region. Indeed, the period of penitence or 'sabbatical leave' spent with the religious order itself only lasted six months. For later in 1991 Bernard Preynat was quietly named as priest in the parish of Neulise, an hour's drive north-west of Lyon, before being moved to Cours-la-Ville, 25 miles to the north. Then in 2013, even though he had been informed several years before of the priest's paedophile past, Cardinal Barbarin went so far as to promote Preynat to the position of dean, in charge of six parishes around nearby Le Coteau. “To be accurate, when I met Father Preynat I found myself opposite a man who recognised his shameful past but who assured me that he had never committed any new act of this type,” the cardinal told Le Figaro newspaper on May 21st.
'They invent a reason and send him to study in Rome or Paris'
The Church does not just physically move priests suspected of having committed acts of paedophilia. It is also a past master in the art of sudden career changes and changes in status. Sick leave, sabbatical leave, side-lining or sending someone to a seminary are also tools used by the church to protest the institution's image. The Church has two aims: to keep the affair quiet while isolating the priest whose conduct has been called into question.
This can be seen from events in 1982 when Father Preynat was for the first time the object of complaints from parents of young Scouts, and who had informed the diocese of their concerns. The priest was quickly sent away. Two people who knew him at the time recall that he was officially on “sick leave”. This leave was short-lived but it allowed the simmering controversy to cool down. The controversy returned, however, in 1991 when other parents got the priest removed for the same reasons. Similarly, Mediapart has discovered that several priests have been moved, ostensibly to be closer to a “sick parent”. These illnesses are often quite genuine but become opportune when a diocese wants a priest to leave discreetly.
Even more common than sick leave in such cases is the use of sabbatical leave. Indeed it is one of the emergency measures favoured by the church. The case of Father Jean-Marc Desperon, who was moved from Lyon to the diocese of Montauban, is a good example. On two occasions, in 1998 and 2003, he was twice obliged to go on leave, following a very precise procedure. Having been put the subject of concerns by parishioners in Lyon in 1994, the priest was transferred to Montauban. But before taking up his duties in his new parish Desperon took a year's sabbatical leave from 1995 to 1996. Was this done to quieten the rumours?
Whatever the reason, the priest's past did not take long to catch up with him. In 2002 Father Desperon was again the object of a complaint by a victim, via a letter sent to the diocese of Montauban, who decided to remove him from the parish. Once again the same procedure took place. “Monsignor Bernard Housset, then Bishop of Montauban, asked [the priest] to stop his ministry for a year's sabbatical in 2003,” the diocese told Mediapart.
Father Desperon's example is not an isolated case. Recently Cardinal Barbarin visited the parish of Sainte-Blandine du Fleuve next to Lyon. His purpose was to explain to the faithful his “decision to ask Father Bruno to take one or two years of sabbatical outside the diocese,” the parish's website explained. It was a way of heading off any controversy as the priest concerned, Father Bruno Houpert, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in 2007 for sexual assault committed against four young men when he was in a post at Rodez in central southern France.
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At the end of April this year Mediapart revealed the story of Father S. from the diocese of Bayonne in south-west France. For twenty-five years this priest, who was suspected of having assaulted a child of 12 in the 1990s then a young adult woman in 2007, was protected by his superiors, who were fully informed about his activities, until he was finally suspended in mid-April. “I took a year's sabbatical in 2007. I was monitored by a psychiatrist for two years,” the priest said when contacted by Mediapart. It was a belated break which helped keep the secret inside the diocese.
Alongside sabbatical leave, the Church also has a whole range of different jobs to choose from for a priest whom it would like to forget. These include the position of diocesan archivist, a chaplain in retirement homes or various forms of administrative managerial positions. Thus having been jailed for four years in 2005 for the rape of a 16-year-old pupil, Father Spina was given conditional release at the end of 2007 and worked as an archivist in the Toulouse diocese. Others were encouraged to resume their theological studies, such as Father L., who was sent on a two-year “study mission” having been convicted in the diocese of Toulouse on child pornography charges in 2008. “There are several ways of doing things when a priest is accused of paedophilia,” says Hendro Munsterman, a Dutch theologian who lectures at the Catholic University of Lyon. “They invent a reason and send him to study in Paris or Rome, for example.”
Even when the judicial system takes up a case, the Church does not release its grip, to ensure the priest is not exposed to the media. Abbeys and convents play a major role in this respect. From Father Preynat, who was taken in by the Saint Petites Soeurs de Saint Joseph at Fontaines-sur-Saône in Lyon, to Father Spina, who stayed with the Prêtres du Sacré Coeur de Jésus de Bétharram (the 'Society of Priests of the Sacred Heart of Betharram') west of Toulouse, religious orders offer a guarantee of discretion and security for the Church. “It can happen that the bishop gives guarantees to the justice system and that the priest is placed in a monastery while awaiting his judgement,” says a former diocesan official who agreed to talk about the issue. These arrangements with the justice system are made easier by the fact that these monasteries are designed precisely to avoid contact with the outside world. “The priest doesn't have the right to go out. In monasteries the places where the monks sleep are called cells,” the former official points out. And in these cells what is said is kept away from prying eyes and ears.
'Recycling priests in Africa or Asia'
Some priests or clerics accused of paedophilia who are not “confined to cloisters” are instead sent on trips away from France, sometimes in a hurry, either to French overseas territories or to other countries. It is an emergency solution to relocate the problem far from the ecclesiastical and judicial authorities in the country of origin. It is less easy for dioceses to arrange this than religious orders and missionary organisations which have more autonomy. “The advantage of the religious orders is that they have access to an international network, to places in Africa or in Asia which allow them to recycle a certain number of clergymen. For a long time they've been sent to developing countries,” says theologian Hendro Munsterman.
This approach is also used for France's overseas départements – similar to counties – or territories. This was the case with the abbot Jean-Marie Vincent, who in 2000 was jailed for four years by the court of appeal in Nancy in north-east France for sexual assaults on children under 15. After he left prison on licence in 2003 the former director of the Les Petits Chanteurs choir from Bar-le-Duc in north-east France was sent to the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, with the agreement of the bishops of Verdun in north-east France and Saint-Denis-de-La Réunion. After his period of licence ended the priest was put in charge of La Source parish on the island. This was a position in which he inevitably came into contact with children and where he stayed until he was defrocked by the Vatican in 2015, after revelations in 2013 about his past caused a scandal in the parish.
Clergymen are sometimes sent abroad even before the justice system has caught up with them. In April this year court proceedings in Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgundy, that involved the Community of Saint John, highlighted this religious order's relocation methods. Former monk Régis Peillon was given a year's suspended prison sentence for sexual assault on a teenager in 2009 and a fellow monk in 2014. Though his superiors had been warned for some years about his “relationship difficulties”, they had sent the monk to a priory at Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, from 2007 to 2008.
While in the African country Régis Peillon had assaulted around 15 teenagers and young adults, offering to “check if their sexual organ was well developed”, according to a report written by Brother Jean-Polycarpe, his superior at the time, which has been seen by Mediapart. The alarm was finally raised in Abidjan and five days later he was sent back to the priory at Rimont in Burgundy. But the monk committed other offences. Those in charge of the religious order, already shaken by several paedophile scandals, kept silent for years and never informed the judicial authorities. As of now, no proceedings have yet begun in the Ivory Coast in relation to the monk's actions.
However, France is not the only country to send abroad priests who are suspected of child abuse. On several occasions foreign priests have been sent to France, without the ecclesiastical authorities here being fully informed of their past. This was what happened in the case of Swiss priest Joël Allaz, accused of sexual assaults on 24 children between 1958 and 1995. The Capuchin monk's superiors moved him from Fribourg in Switzerland then to Grenoble and Lyon in eastern France as each new affair emerged. This practice allowed him to escape justice for a period and also led to two victims in France.
“It is legitimate to ask oneself whether sending the [monk] to France without opening a church investigation or seeking to know what had really happened, at a time when rumours were starting to be heard, constitutes an obstruction to criminal proceedings,” the Swiss judge Yvonne Gendre noted back in 2008. It took until 2016 and Father Allaz's confessions in the press for the justice system to take up the case.
During three months of investigation Mediapart has noted a repeated pattern of international clerical relocations which do not just concern France. A Canadian priest sent from Belgium to Lourdes in southern France, a clergyman from Quebec in Canada exiled to the Eure département in northern France, a Frenchman charged in Austria and sent back here, a monk moved from the Haute-Loire in central France to Romania, a Belgian priest sent to Brazil … and this is far from being an exhaustive list.
In September 2015 the international news site GlobalPost followed the route of five American priests moved to Latin America. “As developed countries find it tougher to keep predator priests on the job, bishops are increasingly moving them to the developing world where there’s less vigorous law enforcement, less independent media and a greater power differential between priests and parishioners,” David Clohessy, spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, told the news site. “This is massive, and my suspicion is that it’s becoming more and more pronounced.”
Back in 2002 The Boston Globe's investigative team Spotlight – made famous by the recent Oscar-winning film of the same name – had already highlighted how paedophile priests in the United States were moved to the countryside and abroad. Mediapart spoke to Spotlight's editor at the time, Walter Robinson, who confirmed the nature of the priest relocation system. “For years, the Boston archdiocese had something called the society of Saint James the Apostle, which was made up of Boston priests who went as missionaries to Latin America. And over those years, a number of those priests were paedophiles who basically were not welcome any more in Boston, and so Cardinal Law [editor's note, Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston] and his predecessors shipped them to Latin America to get them out of sight, and they abused more children in Latin America,” Robinson said.
The journalists at Spotlight discovered the precise criteria under which priests were put out to pasture, and this enabled them to draw up a list of 87 priests suspected of paedophilia and which led to the resignation of Cardinal Law, who had covered up the facts. “When we started to look at it, we knew about 12 or 13 priests [...] What we found with these 12 or 13 priests, is that they were frequently put on the shelf, instead of behind put back to work, they were listed as being on sick leave - and this would sometimes go on for a year or two - or listed as 'awaiting assignment', or as 'being assigned to the clergy personal office',” recalls Walter Robinson. “[...] They had what we called a lend-lease program also. The Boston archdiocese would send an offending priest, who was sort of too hard to handle, on loan to another diocese.”
From 'lend-lease' to 'sabbatical leave', it is a system that one finds on both side of the Atlantic. It is as if a universal system of running away from the problem has been adopted at the highest levels of the Church.
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This investigation for Mediapart by Lyon-based independent journalists Daphné Gastaldi, Mathieu Martinière and Mathieu Périsse was carried out within the framework of a journalistic collective called We Report. The three journalists have set up a dedicated email address for all those who wish to testify about abuse, notably cases relating to paedophile crimes. Witness accounts are guaranteed to remain anonymous if they wish, and the secrecy of sources, protected by law, will be rigorously upheld. If you have information you wish to pass on to the journalists, please write by email to: temoins@wereport.fr
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter