“Our organisations celebrate the courage of the people who have given testimony and, through their words, allowed these facts to come to light. We believe them,” stated several organizations in a joint announcement regarding Henri Groues, known as “Abbe Pierre,” who died in 2007 at the age of 94.
The allegations are detailed in an independent report commissioned by the charities following an initial claim that Groues assaulted a woman. “This work meant the testimonies of seven women could be gathered, attesting to behavior that could be interpreted as sexual assault or sexual harassment,” between 1970 and 2005, the charities said. One of the women “was underage at the time of the events,” they added.
A source at Emmaus told AFP that no criminal complaint has so far been filed.
The bishop’s conference of France’s Catholic Church expressed “deep compassion and shame that such acts could be committed by a priest” in a post on X.
Seventeen years after his death, Groues’s gaunt, bearded features remain a familiar sight in posters in charity shops and metro stations, urging French citizens to think of the poor. At 18, he gave away his inheritance to join the order of Capuchin monks. He later became active in the Resistance to Nazi occupation and spent several post-war years as a member of parliament.
In 1949, he founded the Emmaus community, which preaches self-help for excluded people and has since spread to dozens of countries. He was also a supporter of the “Restos du coeur” soup kitchens movement and criticized city governments for failing to provide lodging for the homeless.
