Vatican ex-envoy to France sentenced over sex assaults

The retired archbishop was found to have groped men during church meetings. It's the latest in a series of sexual scandals to have rocked the Catholic church.

A Paris court on Wednesday convicted Luigi Ventura, a former Vatican ambassador to France of sexually assaulting five men in 2018 and 2019.

The court handed the 76year old retired archbishop a suspended 8-month prison sentence.

Italian- born Ventura was found to have groped the men at meetings in 2018 and 2019. The case erupted in February 2019 amid multiple sex-abuse scandals affecting the Catholic Church.

Ventura was ordered to pay €13,000 ($15,800) in damages. He will now appear on France's sex offenders register.

The Vatican agreed to lift Ventura's diplomatic immunity, the first time it had made such a concession.

But he was not present in court on Wednesday or during the November 10 trial. The former envoy had produced a doctor's note saying it was too dangerous for him to travel from Rome to Paris for the November trial amid France's resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic.

Verdict 'gives victims courage'

Antoinette Frety, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling: "These types of verdicts, when it involves a Vatican ambassador, can give other victims the courage to come forward in other cases potentially involving the church."

"They know now that they will be heard no matter what the rank of the aggressor is within the church. And that's very important," Frety added.

Another lawyer for the plaintiffs, Edmond-Claude Frety, said the verdict should encourage potential victims not to give up.

"It means that victims have to be brave, have to leave the silence and to talk," he said. Ventura "will not be in jail tonight, of course, but it's quite an important conviction because it means that these facts are now considered very severely by the courts."

What did the victims allege?

The police were alerted after a senior figure in the Paris mayor's office filed a complaint about being groped during a public function.

Another four men came forward to allege similar offences at other public events, including a 20-year-old trainee priest who said he had been groped several times during and after Mass.

Ventura has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. He was "shattered" by the verdict, according to his lawyer Solange Doumic on Wednesday. She said she was uncertain whether he would lodge an appeal because the procedure "has been extremely painful for him."