VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Washington Post
July 18, 2025
By Lee Hockstader
A French priest, idolized for serving the poor, also victimized children. Pope Leo should take note.
Just below my window in Paris, a tidy shop does a lively business selling stylish secondhand goods — clothing and books, toys and trinkets — with proceeds going to help France’s destitute and homeless.
The outlet, and scores like it, is part of a philanthropic enterprise founded by a priest known as Abbé Pierre, regarded for decades as an almost sacred figure in France, a paragon on par with Mother Teresa.
The paragon has become a posthumous pariah and a symbol of what should be Pope Leo XIV’s most critical priority: addressing the depthless disgrace of priestly sexual abuse, the scandal from which the Catholic church has failed to extricate itself a quarter century after it erupted.
Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007, was a singular figure in France who prompted a moral awakening to the plight of the penniless starting in the 1950s. For years he was idolized, his name emblazoned on roads, squares and buildings across the country.
But there’s nothing singular about his half-century as a sexual aggressor who victimized women and girls as young as eight. Its painful particulars, in revelations that began last year, fit a familiar pattern that is emblematic of the church’s complicity in a crisis of its own making.
Leo is the fourth pontiff to grapple with clergy sex abuse, and many hope he will do better than the others. Like Pope Francis, his direct predecessor, and Pope Benedict previously, Leo has proclaimed “zero tolerance” for abusers, and expressed compassion for victims. Yet the church’s posture remains more a defensive crouch more than an unfettered effort at reform.
Francis promised an “all-out battle” against clerical sexual violence; to his credit, he met with victims, established a mechanism for reporting abuse and made an example of serial abuser Theodore McCarrick, the onetime cardinal of D.C., who was defrocked.
But Francis ultimately failed to convincingly overhaul the Vatican’s culture of secrecy, foot-dragging and inconsistency, frustrating victims and thwarting accountability. And there is reason to doubt Leo’s papacy will mark a real break.
Disturbingly, the new pontiff, like his two direct predecessors, faces allegations that as a bishop — in Leo’s case, in Peru for eight years until 2023 — he failed to deal aggressively with some abuse allegations.
As the New York Times reported last month, in Peru he fought against a Catholic cult that preyed on children and psychologically abused its members. Yet in another case he is accused of turning his back on three women who said they had been assaulted as children by priests.
“Given his troubling record, I see no reason to believe Pope Leo will take the decisive action required to end the tragedy of clergy sexual abuse,” I was told by Mike Rezendes, who, as an investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, in 2002, helped break the story of the church’s complicity in covering up for priests who had abused children for decades.
Perhaps Leo will surprise us. Maybe he will act proactively, without waiting for the next round of shocking exposés, to enact muscular, transparent institutional procedures to ensure that priests and bishops are held to account.
The case of Abbé Pierre, like that of countless less celebrated priests whose abuses continue to come to light, should serve as an urgent reminder that the church has not surmounted the scandal.
He became an iconic national figure in the frigid winter of 1954 when he famously issued a radio appeal on behalf of unhoused people dying on the streets of Paris. The response was a national reckoning, and an outpouring of cash, clothing, food and temporary shelter. Two years later, the French parliament enacted a law forbidding evictions during winter months, a measure still in force.
Yet according to a new book, it was around that same time that the Vatican became aware of what French church authorities already knew — that Abbé Pierre’s conduct with women and girls was “problematic.” For church authorities, euphemism covered for unspeakable trauma.
The main investigation into the case has been driven, admirably, by three nondenominational associations founded by Abbé Pierre himself during his lifetime. One of them, Emmaus France, runs a network of French secondhand stores including the one I visited. They hired a specialized investigations agency Egaé to do the spade work.
By now, 45 accusations of abuse have surfaced against Abbé Pierre, a list that keeps growing. Tellingly, none of the investigative work was initiated by the church itself, whose records contained incriminating documents.
When Abbé Pierre was first accused of abuse last summer, the shock waves across France were magnified by anger at the church’s inaction. Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Religious Men and Women of France, expressed to Le Figaro newspaper her “infinite sadness and disgust” at Abbé Pierre’s conduct.
As for the church itself, she said, “I don’t know if we will ever learn.”