A priest jailed for rape and sexual assault on a minor in the Haut-Rhin – Obs

Stunned, she can’t find her words. “We loved too our priest. There is so much under the shock. We are trying to understand,” loose only at “Obs” a parishioner of Wintzenheim, a little less than 8,000 inhabitants and a few kilometers from Colmar (Haut-Rhin). The priest of 58 years was so appreciated that when he had recently left the parish to join soon another, to Thann, the faithful had turned out in number at its last mass.

A little earlier, some had even gone so far as to tender a banner displaying a large “no” at the departure of their parish priest. They come to learn that he is now suspected of rape, sexual assault on a minor and abuse of trust. Placed in custody Tuesday morning, the parish priest has been indicted and placed in detention on remand, as reported by France 3 Alsace this Thursday, September 29.

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financial Movements suspects

Without a report of Tracfin (Treatment of intelligence and action against financial channels underground), and the discovery of financial movements of suspects through the personal account of the priest, the investigators would not be raised up to him.

Appointed to Wintzenheim in 2005, the religious would have diverted cheques for the parish, said in the afternoon, the archbishop of Strasbourg, Mgr Jean-Jacques Grallet. The priest would have used of these are, at least in part, to pay to his victim, a young woman, a minor at the material time, in order to obtain her sexual favours.

first suspected of being involved in the embezzlement alleged, the young woman, now 26 years old, was quickly put out of question by the interviewers.

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“No warning” according to archbishop

Difficult, for the time, to know more on the date of the facts of rape and sexual assault charges against the priest, and on their duration. They would have had a place there are “a dozen years”, said without more details Archbishop Grallet to the AFP, when “France 3 Alsace”, which indicates that they would have taken place during ten years, until the majority of the victim.

Contacted by “Obs”, the public prosecutor of Colmar, who opened a criminal investigation, has refused for the moment to comment. Also contacted by “Obs”, Mgr Grallet entrusts “the immense sadness” and “shock” of the allegations involving a priest “sensitive”, “very active” in his parish, a musician and “loved people”.

the One who has been archbishop since 2007, also ensures that if it had been ” wind “of fragilities in the financial” of the parish, he “knew nothing”, he said, of their origin nor of the allegations against the priest. He assures not to have been disposed of “no alert the order of the slightest fault.”

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“considerable hurt”

“I will try to be responsive on that side,” says the one who, last April, when new measures to combat paedophilia in the Church as announced by the Conference of bishops of France (CEF), was obliged to recall his commitment and firmness.

“I made sure as always, when I learn something, this is reported to the justice,” he said to the local press by announcing it wants to put in place, among other things, a cell listens to the victims.

“for me, This is a huge surprise and a considerable hurt to the Church that I represent”, he says also this Thursday. The priest would celebrate next Sunday his first mass in his new parish. He is now detained at the prison of Colmar.

Céline Rastello