New abuse allegations emerge against venerated Abbé Pierre

More abuse allegations have been made against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest and campaigner who was long venerated as a modern-day saint.

In July, the Emmaus anti-poverty charity which Abbé Pierre founded said it had heard allegations of sexual assault and harassment from seven women and it believed them.

Emmaus has now decided to expunge Abbé Pierre from the organisation after 17 more women spoke out about having suffered abuse at his hands.

The priest, who died in 2007 aged 94, used to regularly appear in polls as one of the most popular French people of modern times because of his tireless work for the poor and homeless.

The Emmaus movement, which he founded in 1949, operates in more than 40 countries. In France, his caped and bearded figure became an emblem of Christian self-sacrifice.

Now, following a second release of witness statements gathered by Egaé, an independent consultancy, the movement has decided to remove Abbé Pierre’s name from its various organisations.

The Abbé Pierre Foundation is to be retitled, while the board of Emmaus France is to vote on removing the priest’s name from its logo. The Abbé Pierre Centre in Esteville in Normandy, where he lived for many years and is buried, is to close for good.

A decision will also be taken on how to dispose of hundreds of statuettes, busts and other images of the charity’s creator.

“We are in a state of shock, very hurt and very angry,” said Christophe Robert, who heads the Abbé Pierre Foundation. “We extend our fullest support to all the victims who have had the courage to speak out.”

A first blow fell in July when the Emmaus movement revealed allegations made by seven women, who said they had been victims of sexual aggression mainly in the form of breast-touching and unwanted kisses.

The 17 women who have come forward since have made claims that are in some cases more serious.

One woman – designated as “J” by the Egaé consultancy – said she had been forced to give oral sex to Abbé Pierre, and made to watch him masturbate. “J” is now dead but she told her story to her daughter.

The consultancy’s report also includes the experience of woman named as “M” who in the 1990s came to the priest in distress, asking for help to find a home.

“Their dozen or so meetings were always accompanied by forced kisses and breast-touching. Abbé Pierre put his hand on her (private parts) though her trousers,” according to the report.

Another charge relates to a girl, designated “X”, who was only eight or nine years old when the priest allegedly abused her in the mid-1970s, touching her chest and kissing her “with his tongue.”

A staff-member at the National Assembly, where Abbé Pierre was a deputy from 1945 to 1951, is quoted as saying that “he behaved like a sexual predator, who assaulted his female colleagues and had sexual relations with them.”

The Egaé report said that there were many more accounts, but it had left out those which were given anonymously or where the complainants were reluctant to reveal full details. The most recent claims relate to when the priest was 92.

The sudden fall of a modern-day icon – only last year he was the subject was a hagiographic biopic – has been greeted with less surprise than might have been expected. Successive revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have seen to that.

More perplexing to many is growing evidence that colleagues in Emmaus – and in the Catholic Church – were aware of Abbé Pierre’s sexual behaviour, but failed to speak out.

Partly this was because in these earlier times – the first alleged assaults were in the 1950s – such actions were not treated very seriously.

But when stories of Abbé Pierre’s unwanted advances became impossible to ignore, it seems certain that church and charity colluded to keep his name out of the press, and thus preserve his achievement for the poor and homeless.

Born Henri Grouès in 1912 in Lyon, Abbé Pierre was ordained in 1938, taking a vow of chastity. He worked in the Resistance in World War Two, and became a household name in the winter of 1954 when he made a famous appeal on behalf of the homeless.

According to an investigation by Le Monde newspaper, church hierarchy learned of his predatory behaviour the following year when, on a visit to US and Canada, he was asked to cut the trip short because of complaints from women.

Biographer Pierre Lunel said that after the 1954 appeal “there were groupies of every kind who just wanted to pull out a hair of his beard. It was total hero-worship. At that point there were definitely sexual adventures.”

In 1957 Abbé Pierre went to a clinic in Switzerland, ostensibly to recover from exhaustion but in reality to keep him out of trouble. After that the church insisted he be accompanied by a “socius” – a church helper whose real job was to keep an eye on him.

In fact from the 1960s his relations with the church grew more distant, while his charity became a large and complex organisation. For the next 40 years he remained as a figurehead, and a reference in France for humility and self-giving.

Speaking on Monday, the head of Emmaus International, Adrien Caboche, confirmed that throughout that time Abbé Pierre’s non-observance of his vow of chastity had been no secret to those in the know.

“We were aware of course that Abbé Pierre had an emotional and a sexual life. But we were all stunned by the violent aspect which has now been revealed.”