A French bishop has been given a preliminary charge of attempting to rape an adult man a decade ago, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Monday. It is the most recent of a growing variety of accusations of sexual abuse by clergy in France.
The Bishops’ Conference of France said the accused bishop, Georges Colomb, contests the charge and deserves the presumption of innocence. He has asked the Vatican to step other than his duties as bishop of La Rochelle and Saintes in western France to organize his defense.
French investigative website Mediapart reported that senior figures within the Catholic Church were aware of the accusations for years.
The allegations didn’t reach prosecutors until May of this 12 months. That’s when lawyers for the Archdiocese of Paris and a Catholic group called the Foreign Missions of Paris, shortened to MEP in French, submitted a report of a rape attempt by Colomb in 2013, based on the prosecutor’s office.
Colomb headed the MEP from 2010 to 2016, and his accuser was staying in MEP facilities on the time of the incident, based on French media reports. Colomb became a bishop in 2016.
As a results of the following investigation, Colomb was detained for questioning last week and magistrates filed a preliminary charge on Friday, the prosecutor’s office said. Colomb is under judicial supervision and barred from contact with the victim or witnesses pending further investigation.
His accuser has not been publicly named. After the alleged rape attempt, the person spoke about what happened to a different official within the MEP, Gilles Reithinger.
Reithinger told public broadcaster France-3 that the person said Colomb proposed an oil massage that made him uncomfortable but didn’t mention any sexual wrongdoing. Reithinger, now bishop of Strasbourg, said he raised the problem with Colomb’s superior on the time but didn’t see any reason to report the incident to prosecutors.
The bishops’ conference said in an announcement Monday that it expresses its concern for the alleged victim, and offered support for ‘’all those that are troubled or hurt by this news.’’
A lawyer for Colomb didn’t reply to request for comment.
France is coming to terms with a long time of covered-up abuse by church-related figures amid a world reckoning over the problem.
France’s bishops’ conference agreed to offer reparations after a 2021 report estimated some 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by priests or other church-related figures within the country. The estimates were based on broader research by France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research into sexual abuse of youngsters.
