Archbishop Michel Aupetit (former) Archbishop of Paris
Relationship with a woman was 'ambiguous'
Relationship with a woman was 'ambiguous'
© Ludovic Marin / AFP
Probably the last thing the French Catholic Church wanted right now was another sex scandal involving a senior cleric, but that's just what they've got in the form of Archbishop Michel Aupetit, (former) Archbishop of Paris, who has resigned following the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with a women, despite his vow of celibacy and his requirement that all those under him in his archdiocese take the same vow.
The story of the consensual relationship was exposed by Le Point magazine. Aupetit denied that he had had a sexual relationship with the woman but told Le Point that the relationship was 'ambiguous' - a neat euphemism for clandestine sexual relations with a woman outside marriage and contrary to his oath as an ordained Catholic priest.
This came on top of the recent report which revealed that 3,000 French Catholic priests had sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years and that there had been a widespread, systematic cover up. When abuse by lay members of Catholic schools and other institutions was taken into account, the number of abused children, almost all of which were young boys, rose to some 330,000.
Aupetit claimed he had ended the relationship after discussing it with Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, Archbishop of Paris at the time. Cardinal Vingt-Trois appears to have done nothing more with the information, either at the time, or since.
After receiving his letter of resignation, Pope Francis appears to have acted with uncharacteristic haste in accepting it and naming Monsignor George Pontier as his replacement. Similar cases of clerical misconduct have taken over a year for Pope Francis to decide to act. For example, it took him over a year to finally accept the resignation of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the former archbishop of Lyon, who offered to resign in 2019 after a French court convicted him for failing to report a paedophile priest. Pope Francis initially rejected the offer but then accepted it more than a year later.
Aupetit's relationship with the woman, which was known to Cardinal Vingt-Trois, took place when he was a parish priest, six years before he was elevated to the post of archbishop. Presumably, as head of the diocese in which Aupetit had worked as a priest, Cardinal Vingt-Trois, either failed to disclose what he knew of his oath-breaking sexual activity, or lied about it, or was not even consulted prior to Aupetit's appointment.
Membership of the Catholic Church in France has been declining steadily since the second half of the 20th Century. Between 1996 and 2006, Baptisms declined by 19.1% Confirmations by 35.3% and Marriages in Catholic churches by 28.4% (source: Wikipedia).
The many sexual abuse scandals involving Catholic priests throughout the world, and the abuses by nuns of woman and children in their care in Ireland, Spain and elsewhere, will have resulted in an even further decline in membership.
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