PARIS: A former Vatican envoy to France was found guilty of sexually assaulting five men, in the latter case of misconduct by a senior Catholic church official.
Archbishop Luigi Ventura, who served as papal nuncio in France until December 2019, received an eight-month prison sentence on Wednesday from a Paris court on Wednesday for assaults between 2018 and 2019.
One of the victims, an employee of the city of Paris, who was commissioned to welcome the clergyman in the mayor’s New Year’s speech in 2019, said the archbishop had touched him on “insistent and repeated” way.
The 76-year-old archbishop was convicted in absentia. The court had accepted a note from his doctor saying he should not travel from Rome to Paris during the current phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Santa Seu press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The attempt to reach the archbishop through the Vatican was unsuccessful.
In July 2019, the Vatican took the unusual step of withdrawing the archbishop’s diplomatic immunity from the persecution, in accordance with what he said were his wishes, of “cooperating fully and spontaneously with the judicial authorities. French “. This summer, the Vatican spokesman said Archbishop Ventura reaffirmed his innocence.
Archbishop Ventura, a longtime Vatican diplomat, is one of several members of the Catholic hierarchy accused of sexual misconduct with adults in recent years, which adds another dimension to the church’s long-standing crisis over clerical abuse of minors.
In June, the pope reinstated his former bishop Gustavo Zanchetta in a high-level Vatican job, despite facing allegations of sexual harassment in his native Argentina. Bishop Zanchetta has denied the lack of acts.
Last month, a Vatican report showed that Pope Francis and his two immediate predecessors had been unable to discipline U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for years for sexual misconduct. St. John Paul II appointed McCarrick as Archbishop of Washington, DC, in 2000, even after he was warned that he had been accused of sharing the bed with adult seminarians and pedophiles.
Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican pressured Mr. McCarrick to resign as archbishop of Washington and asked him to keep a low profile, but did not subject him to ecclesiastical judgment. Pope Francis followed the example of his predecessors and assumed the allegations had been rejected, according to the report. In 2019, McCarrick became the first cardinal of modern times to be removed from the priesthood after a church trial found him guilty of child sexual abuse and adult sexual misconduct. McCarrick denied the foul.
Write to Francis X. Rocca to [email protected] and Noemie Bisserbe to [email protected]
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