“What did the Vatican know about Abbot Pierre? I don't know when the Vatican found out about it (…). I don't know because I haven't been here (the pope) and it hasn't occurred to me to research it,” Francis said on the plane back to Rome, upon returning from his Asia-Pacific tour.
“Definitely, after [s]dead, that's for sure. But first, I don't know,” he told accompanying journalists, calling the abbot a “terrible sinner.”
Seven weeks after the first revelations accusing him of sexual abuse, Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007 at the age of 94, is the target of 17 new testimonies accusing him of sexual violence committed between 1950 and 2000, the Pope Francis considered this a “very painful, very delicate” issue.
“don't hide”
“Good people, people, people who do good, you later quoted Abbé Pierre, despite all the good things (he did), we find that this person is a terrible sinner. This is our human condition,” the Argentine pope said in response to a journalist's question.
“We don't have to say: cover it, cover it so it doesn't show! Public sins are public. They too must be condemned. Abbot Pierre is a man who has done so much good, but he is also a sinner,” he added.
“We need to be clear about these things, not hide, working against attacks is something we all need to do. Not only against sexual assault, but against all kinds of abuse: social abuse, educational abuse, changing people's mentality, attacks on freedom… abuse is, in my eyes, a demonic thing! »