PARIS — A Catholic cardinal offered his resignation on Thursday after being found guilty by a French court of covering up decades-old sexual abuse by a priest in his diocese, a surprise victory for the priest’s accusers, who had forced the case to trial after it was dropped by prosecutors.
The conviction of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, was the first in France against such a high-profile clergyman, adding to a long list of sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church just weeks after a landmark meeting at the Vatican ended without a concrete plan to tackle the issue.
Cardinal Barbarin, 68, was found guilty of failing to report child abuse by the Rev. Bernard Preynat to the authorities from 2014 to 2015, after parishioners accused the priest of sexually abusing dozens of Boy Scouts in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The court handed down a six-month suspended prison sentence to Cardinal Barbarin who had faced up to three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros, nearly $51,000. His lawyers said they would appeal.
The cardinal said later on Thursday that he would meet with Pope Francis in the coming days to submit his resignation.
“I want to repeat my compassion for the victims,” he said at a short news conference in Lyon, where the trial was held.
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
François Devaux, one of Father Preynat’s accusers, told reporters that the verdict was significant. “I think that this sends a very strong signal that no one is above the law,” he said. Mr. Devaux added, “It is a great victory for the protection of children.”
The cardinal had always denied that there had been a cover-up, arguing that the victims were adults when he learned of the abuse and that it was not his place to go to the authorities on their behalf.
At the trial, which included emotional testimony from Father Preynat’s accusers, the cardinal said he had even encouraged one of them to get in touch with other victims and stressed that he had followed the Vatican’s instructions in dealing with the case.
One church official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, who had told Cardinal Barbarin to discipline the priest and to keep him away from children “while avoiding any public scandal,” was cited in the case, but the Vatican refused to let him testify.
Prosecutors dropped the charges in 2016 after an investigation, but nine of Father Preynat’s accusers used a special procedure to force the cardinal and five other French church officials and employees of the diocese to stand trial.
The five other defendants, who were facing the same charges as Cardinal Barbarin, were found not guilty by the court.
Father Preynat was a Boy Scout leader in the Lyon region from 1972 to 1991. He admitted to some sexual abuse in letters to the families of the victims and was charged in 2016 after a separate investigation. He could stand trial this year.
The accusers said that Cardinal Barbarin had been slow to take action after he learned about the abuse by Father Preynat, who was removed from office only in August 2015, years after the first allegations against him surfaced and months after the cardinal was approached by one of the priest’s accusers.
Victims also argued that the cardinal had a legal responsibility to warn the French authorities even though the abuse had occurred decades ago, on his predecessors’ watch.
Yves Sauvayre, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, said that the ruling was a “turning point in the fight of these people who remained silent for years.”
“Victims will no longer be afraid,” Mr. Sauvayre told reporters. It would no longer be the case, Mr. Sauvayre said, that “because there are important people, powerful people, they won’t be held accountable.”
Last year, the bishops’ conference of France created an independent commission to shed light on sexual abuse in the French clergy, and a report is expected in 2021.
Cardinal Barbarin, one of the best-known Catholic figures in France, was appointed to his post in the Lyon Diocese in 2002. He is an outspoken and media-savvy conservative who has publicly denounced the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013 and is heavily involved in interreligious dialogue.
But accusations that he had hidden abuse by Father Preynat damaged his image. At the heart of the Preynat case were questions about exactly when Cardinal Barbarin become aware of the accusations.
In 2014, the cardinal was contacted by a parishioner and former Boy Scout who said that he had been abused by Father Preynat and that he was disturbed to learn that the priest was still officiating and still in contact with children.
Cardinal Barbarin said at trial, “I never sought to hide these horrible acts, even less cover them up.”
But the cardinal acknowledged several years ago in an interview with the newspaper La Croix that he first heard rumors about the priest “around 2007-2008” and that in 2010 he had personally questioned the priest and left him in office after receiving assurances that no abuse had occurred since 1991.
In Thursday’s ruling, the court said that the cardinal had shown “inertia” in failing to report the abuse, despite being aware that several victims had not yet come forward.
“Even though his duties gave him access to all of the information and even though he had the ability to usefully analyze and communicate it,” the court ruled, the cardinal had “consciously” chosen not to warn the authorities, in order “to protect the institution he belongs to.”
In a similar case in 2018, André Fort, the bishop of Orléans, a town in north-central France, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence for failing to report sexual abuse by a priest under his purview. In 2001, another French bishop, Pierre Pican, was given a three-month suspended prison sentence over similar charges.
A movie about the Preynat case, “By the Grace of God,” directed by François Ozon, won the runner-up prize at the Berlin International Film Festival last month. The title refers to a 2016 news conference by Cardinal Barbarin during which he said, “Most of the facts, by the grace of God, are outside the statute of limitations.”
Father Preynat had filed a lawsuit trying to delay the film’s release in France last month, arguing that it was detrimental to his presumption of innocence ahead of his trial. But the lawsuit was dismissed.
Source : Nytimes
