FRANCE
Affairs Today
Again the Catholic Church gets tangled up in various scandals of pedophilia. However this new controversy seems to have reached the top of the hierarchy,the person in question: Cardinal Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon.
A controversy which seems to tell us more about a social division in France rather than a criminal case. ‘Most of the cases, thanks God!, are time barred.’ said the Cardinal Barbarin interviewed about the recent scandals of pedophilia. Even though the Cardinal will apologise later on for those terrible words, his statements represent a certain mindset within the French Catholic Church and its supporters. The facts of pedophilia against young scouts go back to the late 1980s. Father Bernard Preynat admitted the charges against him in January 2015, however, he was removed from office in August 2015. Another case of pedophile abuse committed by a priest was revealed in an interview published by the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, with events dating back to the 1990s. The controversy has focused on the person of Cardinal Barbarin. Some victims of the pedophile priests have decided to lodge charges against him, mainly for not revealing the facts which he certainly knew since 2007. The Preynat father told the police that the facts he is accused of were known by the high clergy in 1991. In addition, a communication error of the Cardinal himself led him to admit that he knew the facts since 2007 while his diocese had officially stated that he had been made aware of the cases in 2014.
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