FRANCE
France 24
Allegations of a cover-up in the highest reaches of French Catholicism have revived the spectre of clerical child sex abuse and cast a pall over France’s most prominent cardinal.
“Are we seeing the makings of a French ‘Spotlight’?” asked French daily Le Figaro on Tuesday, referring to the Oscar-winning movie that charts the disclosure of a massive cover-up of child abuse by the Roman Catholic Church in the US. While the comparison with the nascent French investigation is tempting, it is obviously a long stretch – if only because of the absence, in the French case, of a Spotlight-like team of investigative journalists uncovering the facts.
Still, the allegations have the potential to profoundly rattle the Church in a country where half the population continues to consider itself Catholic. In particular, they threaten to derail the career of France’s most prominent clergyman, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, a man long touted as a possible candidate for the papacy.
The 65-year-old prelate has fiercely denied charges that he covered up paedophilia crimes by failing to remove a priest in his diocese known to have abused boy scouts decades before he took up his post in 2002. Barbarin is also accused of failing to act against another Lyon priest when it emerged in 2009 he had abused a boy in the past.
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