FRANCE
Business Standard
French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and a senior Vatican official were today ordered to stand trial for allegedly covering up for a paedophile priest accused of abusing several boy scouts in Lyon in the 1980s.
The most senior French Catholic official to be tried for failing to report a predator priest will go on trial on April 4 next year along with six co-defendants, a court in Lyon said.
Barbarin, who is archbishop of Lyon, is accused of having shielded priest Bernard Preynat from claims of abuse involving scouts in his Lyon parish.
The head of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Spanish Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, is accused of complicity in the alleged cover-up.
In correspondence with Barbarin about the priest the Vatican’s number three had advised the cardinal to take “necessary disciplinary measures while avoiding public scandal” — seen as a warning to keep the abuse quiet.
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