The Lyon public prosecutor’s office launched a preliminary investigation between 2019 and 2020 into suspicions of sexual assault attributed by two young women to a deceased Lyon priest, former superior of a reputable educational institution, a judicial source said on Friday January 21.
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These revelations, published by the weekly Tribune de Lyon, come after post-mortem accusations against Father Louis Ribes, who died in 1994, who allegedly “many victimsin the 1970s and 1980s, according to the Archdiocese of Lyon, which reported several testimonies concerning this priest, a painter sometimes nicknamed “the Picasso of churches“.
An open investigation
In this new case rooted out of the past, several testimonies implicate Georges Babolat, an influential figure in Lyon Catholicism, who died in 2006. Father Babolat was from 1978 to 2001 the superior of the Chartreux institution, a prestigious establishment which trains the elite Lyonnaises for many generations. However, the facts revealed by the investigations carried out thirteen years after his death, are within the framework of a summer camp located in Haute-Savoie, independent of the Chartreux.
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An investigation into sexual assaults on minors was opened following a letter from the mother of an alleged victim, sent to the public prosecutor of Lyon, in April 2019. Her daughter and another young woman were heard by the investigators, confirming that he had been touched by the priest in the 1990s. The case was closed without further action in April 2020, by extinction of the public action, without having established complicity.
The mother behind the legal proceedings had previously sent a report to Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in 2016. In response, the former archbishop of Lyon had sent him a letter, asking him “forgiveness on behalf of the whole Church for this scandal», and affirming the need «to operate a great purification of the memory“. The archdiocese, already shaken in recent years by the resounding Preynat and Barbarin affairs, explained on Friday that “since the 2019 report, no other witnesses have come forward» with the institution.
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“Even after the Ciase report (note: last October on pedocrime in the Church of France since the 1950s), no additional cases have been reported.“, he added. This report estimates that 330,000 people were victims of sexual violence when they were minors, by clerics, religious or people linked to the Church.