_WORLD WATCH______________________________
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Bishop charged with covering up abuse
Confessional seal at issue

A French bishop has been charged with failing to turn in a priest who allegedly confessed to sexually abusing children.

Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux is accused of hearing Father Rene Bissey’s confession, and thus learning of the priest’s misdeeds. But instead of referring him to police, the bishop only relieved him of his pastoral duties, prosecutors charged. (A priest who hears confessions is obliged not only to maintain the secrecy of the confession, but also to refrain from taking any action based on what he has heard.) Father Bissey was sentenced to 18 years in prison last October for raping one boy and sexually abusing 10 others between 1989 and 1996. 

At the crux of the case against Bishop Pican is the confessional seal. Testifying at Father Bissey’s trial, Bishop Pican declined to say whether he had known about the assaults, and instead insisted that the sanctity of the confessional be respected. The bishop is the first Church leader in France to be charged with complicity in a cover-up of sexual abuse.

“I am waiting for the responsibility and guilt of the bishop to be recognized. This recognition of guilt could give the Church an opportunity for a great debate,” Jean Chevais, a lawyer for the families of the victims, told a television interviewer.

In December, the former Bishop of Evreux, Jacques Gaillot, admitted entrusting a parish to a Canadian priest in the late 1980s despite knowing that he might have pedophile tendencies. Bishop Gaillot was removed from his diocese in the Normandy town and given a titular diocese by the Vatican five years ago because of his dissenting views on the Church’s teachings.