"Free electron", "bishop of the margins" and at the head of a phantom diocese after his eviction from the diocese of Evreux, Monsignor Jacques Gaillot, who died Wednesday, April 12 in Paris, was one of the most controversial and popular figures of the Church of France.

He died in Paris in the afternoon following a dazzling illness, told AFP a relative of the bishop. "He died peaceful, serene, surrounded by his loved ones," added the same source. The diocese of Evreux had recently indicated that Bishop Gaillot was suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Bishop of Evreux for 13 years (1982-1995), the Vatican withdrew his office in January 1995, because of his non-Orthodox positions within the Church. Media, it detonated and annoyed in high places, until the Vatican, "disoriented", asked the bishops to France to clean up their homes. "Beyond certain positions that may have divided, we remember that he has especially kept the concern for the poorest and the peripheries," said Wednesday evening to AFP the Conference of Bishops of France.

Born on September 11, 1935, in Saint-Dizier (Haute-Marne), the son of wine merchants, Jacques Gaillot, a graduate in theology and graduate of the Institute of Liturgy, was ordained a priest in March 1961, after being mobilized for 28 months in Algeria.

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After a steady rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he was appointed Bishop of Évreux in May 1982. It was there that his willingly provocative positions (he was in favor of the marriage of priests and condoms to fight AIDS, for example) gradually earned him an image as a marginal bishop, in increasingly open conflict with the Church.

The boat pitched for the first time in February 1989, when Bishop Gaillot gave an interview to the monthly Lui and the weekly homosexual Gay-Pied. The Vatican, "disoriented", then asked the bishops to France to clean up their homes.

Accustomed to TV sets

The Vatican removed him from office in January 1995. This eviction of a popular, media-savvy and perceived progressive bishop aroused strong emotion in France, with many demonstrations of support. In Evreux, several thousand people attended his farewell mass on January 22, 1995.

After his departure from Evreux, he was named honorary bishop "in partibus" of Partenia, a diocese in Sitifian Mauritania (region of Setif in Algeria) disappeared in the fifth century and today called "ghost" because without churches or Catholics for centuries. Bishop Gaillot then made this diocese an instrument of defense of the excluded (undocumented, homeless, etc.).

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He was co-president of the association "Droits devant!", which he created in 1994 with the singer Jacques Higelin, the doctor Léon Schwartzenberg and the philosopher Albert Jacquard, and which fights against precariousness and exclusion.

A regular guest on television sets, he defended the occupations of unoccupied buildings by families of poorly housed, the use of condoms to fight AIDS, the abortion pill, the ordination of married men.

In July 1995, he boarded the Rainbow Warrior during Greenpeace's campaign against the resumption of French nuclear tests in the Pacific. In the summer of 1996, he actively participated in the occupation of the Saint-Bernard church in Paris by some 300 undocumented Africans.

Meeting with Pope Francis

Twenty years after his departure from Evreux, Bishop Gaillot was received by Pope Francis for nearly an hour in September 2015. He told AFP at the time that he had been "destabilized" by Francis' informal reception at the Vatican.

"I was in a parlor of the Maison Sainte-Marthe (where the pope resides) and a door opens: it is the pope who enters, simply. The meeting was family-based, without protocol. He is truly a free man. At one point he stood up and said: Do you have a photographer? As there was none, we took (a picture) with a mobile (phone)," he said at the time.

In 2010, Archbishop Gaillot also admitted to having welcomed into his diocese a priest guilty of paedocriminal acts. This Canadian priest, Denis Vadeboncoeur, had been authorized by the Church to practice in France despite being sentenced to 20 months in prison in Canada in 1985 for multiple acts of paedocriminality.

Bishop Jacques Gaillot, aware of these facts, had nevertheless appointed him in 1988 parish priest and episcopal vicar, putting him in contact with children in the west of the Eure. He acknowledged "a mistake" and explained that "at the time, the Church functioned like this."

With AFP

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