Who is Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, a figure of the Church accused of sexual violence?

Europe 1 with AFP 7:26 p.m., November 7, 2022, modified at 7:26 p.m., November 7, 2022

At the head of the diocese of Bordeaux, Jean-Pierre Ricard had faced in the second half of the 2010s the first wave of revelations about sexual assault in the Church by encouraging the high Catholic hierarchy to denounce the facts.

It is now also implicated.

Again, a figure of the Church is overtaken by the scandal.

And not just any.

Ex-archbishop of Bordeaux from 2001 to 2019, cardinal since 2006, president of the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF) from 2001 to 2007, Mgr Jean-Pierre Ricard, 78, admitted "reprehensible" conduct towards a minor of 14 years, 35 years ago.

The nature and details of the undisclosed facts

The announcement was made by the current president of the CEF Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, who did not reveal either the nature or the details of the facts of which the ex-prelate, now retired in a presbytery, is incriminated. Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in Peyruis, a region where he has family ties.

Committed 35 years ago while he was stationed in Marseille, the facts are probably prescribed but their revelation illustrates all the ambiguities of the high hierarchy of French Catholicism in the face of sexual abuse committed in the Church.

In 2016, at the height of the storm around the ex-archbishop of Lyon Philippe Barbarin, accused of not having denounced to justice the sexual abuse committed by a priest of whom he had however been aware, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard had had unequivocal words but which resonate strangely in the light of the current revelations.

"When there is an accusation, either the family must file a complaint, or the priest must be invited to denounce himself, or the bishop has a duty to report to the public prosecutor", had - he declared to the press insisting on the cases concerning the minors.

For “about twenty years we have become aware of the seriousness of these acts with this desire to truly take into consideration the suffering of the victims” who “need that things be said and that those responsible be sanctioned and condemned”, he added.

A "good person", a "good-natured man"

In 2017, Bishop Ricard had also reported the former bishop of Dax to justice because of "inappropriate pastoral attitudes" towards young people, in the words of the CEF.

He had been forced to resign but the local prosecutor's office had dismissed the case.

Bishop Ricard is also a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which receives reports of abuses committed by clerics.

Round and physical face to match, Cardinal Ricard is described by a former collaborator of the diocese of Bordeaux as a "good person", a "good-natured man", "open and welcoming" who liked to travel through the 593 parishes of which he had the charge.

At the head of the CEF, he had pleaded for the Catholic Church to invest in social issues: bioethics, protection of the environment, defense of the family or "imbalances" of globalization.

A career mainly in the diocese of Marseille

As number one of the bishops of France and as archbishop of Bordeaux, he had also had to manage the thorny relations with the fundamentalist current of the Lefebvrist priests who had chosen to occupy a church in the Gironde capital.

Born in 1944 in Marseille, this son of a general secretary of the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry did his hypokhâgne in a high school in the city of Marseille before entering the Grand Séminaire then the Catholic Institute of Paris.

It was in Marseille that he spent most of his career, occupying around ten posts at all levels of the diocese, from 1970 to 1993, before being appointed Bishop of Grenoble from 1993 to 1996 then Bishop of Montpellier until until Pope John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Bordeaux-Bishop of Bazas in 2001.

Two years from his "retirement" as cardinal, Mgr Ricard is one of the four French cardinals to be able to sit in the College of Cardinals likely to elect a new pope.