The former conference president Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard admitted he behaved in a “reprehensible way with a 14-year-old girl” 35 years ago. Here’s where his case stands at the Vatican.
The report landed on French Catholics like a bomb. French bishops had never considered sexual abuse a serious problem. “We have been in denial for 20 years,” Father Goujon said. “The bishops said that [that kind of abuse] could never happen here.”