French prosecutors announced on Tuesday, February 4, that no criminal investigation could be opened into a raft of sexual abuse accusations against charity icon Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007, because the statute of limitations had expired.
Born Henri Grouès, the clergyman Abbé Pierre was widely admired as a friend to the poverty-stricken and homeless when he died aged 94. But in recent months, multiple allegations that he committed sexual abuse have shattered his saintly image and left the two charities he founded desperately trying to dissociate themselves from him.
Dozens of people have made accusations of sexual abuse against the French monk, but those acts are alleged to have taken place from the 1950s to the 2000s.
The office of the Paris prosecutor confirmed Tuesday that the monk himself could not be prosecuted after his death. Meanwhile, people who might have been aware of Abbé Pierre's behavior but did not report it to the authorities also could not face justice due to the statute of limitations, meaning too much time had elapsed to allow a prosecution, it added.
Tuesday's announcement came after France's Catholic Church asked prosecutors in January to probe Abbé Pierre as well as all those responsible of a "failure to denounce rape and sexual assault of vulnerable people and minors."
"The Paris prosecutor's office has stated that the public action was terminated by the death of the accused in 2007 as far as he was personally concerned, and prescribed (by the statute of limitations) as far as any failure to report facts could have possibly concerned," prosecutors said in a statement to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The church has been under huge pressure to explain its silence surrounding Abbé Pierre's behavior. In January, the head of the Bishops' Conference of France (CEF), Archbishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, said that he had "referred the matter to courts." In late January, the Abbé Pierre Foundation, which the priest established in 1987 to combat inadequate housing, changed its name to the Foundation for Housing the Disadvantaged.
Emmaüs, an association set up by Abbé Pierre in 1949, has also sought to distance itself from him. Emmaüs France has shut down a memorial site dedicated to the priest in the town of Esteville in northwestern France.