French Courtroom Convicts Former Vatican Envoy of Sexual Assault

Just one of the victims, an employee of the city of Paris who was tasked with welcoming the cleric at the mayor’s New Yr handle in 2019, reported the archbishop experienced groped him in an “insistent and repeated” fashion.

The 76-year-aged archbishop was convicted in absentia. The court experienced recognized a be aware from his health care provider declaring that he shouldn’t travel from Rome to Paris in the course of the recent phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Holy See Press Office didn’t right away reply to a request for remark. An endeavor to arrive at the archbishop via the Vatican was not profitable.

In July 2019, the Vatican took the unconventional move of withdrawing the archbishop’s diplomatic immunity to prosecution, in accordance with what it explained ended up his wishes, to “collaborate thoroughly and spontaneously with the French judicial authorities.” This summer season, the Vatican spokesman mentioned Archbishop Ventura reaffirmed his innocence.

Archbishop Ventura, a longtime Vatican diplomat, is a single of several senior customers of the Catholic hierarchy accused of sexual misconduct with older people in new several years, introducing yet another dimension to the church’s extended-operating disaster over the clerical abuse of kids.

In June, the pope reinstated his longtime protégé Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta in a higher-stage Vatican career, even though he is dealing with expenses of sexual harassment in his indigenous Argentina. Bishop Zanchetta has denied wrongdoing.

Final month, a Vatican report showed that

Pope Francis

and his two rapid predecessors had unsuccessful for a long time to self-discipline U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexual misconduct.

St. John Paul II

appointed Mr. McCarrick as archbishop of Washington, D.C., in 2000, even soon after currently being warned that he had been accused of sharing his mattress with grownup seminarians and of pedophilia.

Less than Pope

Benedict XVI,

the Vatican pressed Mr. McCarrick to resign as archbishop of Washington and asked him to retain a lower profile, but did not matter him to a church demo. Pope Francis followed the lead of his predecessors and assumed that the allegations had been rejected, the report mentioned. In 2019, Mr. McCarrick turned the very first cardinal in modern day occasions to be dismissed from the priesthood immediately after a church demo discovered him responsible of sexual abuse of minors and sexual misconduct with grown ups. Mr. McCarrick denied wrongdoing.

Create to Francis X. Rocca at [email protected] and Noemie Bisserbe at [email protected]