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A priest working in northwest France has been charged with drugging and raping a 15-year-old whom he met through a gay dating app, prosecutors and legal sources said on Thursday.
The priest, from a rural parish near Rennes, was charged with aggravated rape and drug administration to a minor after a meeting was arranged in Paris last week via the app Grindr.
According to RTL radio, the priest, in his 50s, proposed several drugs to the boy in a hotel room, including the ecstasy derivative MDMA and a substance similar to GHB, a notorious date rape drug.
The men had sex, but the boy felt unwell and informed friends.
The case is the latest in a long line of sexual assault scandals that have wreaked havoc on the French church.
French Catholics were again shocked by a cardinal’s confession earlier this week, after an investigation last year revealed the alarming scale of priest sexual abuse in recent decades.
One of the country’s most senior Catholic figures, Jean-Pierre Ricard, on Monday admitted a “reprehensible” act with a 14-year-old girl in the 1980s, sparking a judicial inquiry.
Church leaders revealed on the same day that 10 other retired or serving bishops are facing allegations of sexual abuse.
The priest from Rennes told investigators that he often came to the capital to meet men in order to collude with drug users in hotels, RTL reported.
He denied the rape allegation, saying the boy indicated in his Grindr file that he was over 18 and that he had not asked any questions.
“I can imagine how men and women would be outraged by this case,” Archbishop Pierre d’Ornellas of Rennes said in a statement, adding that he had already responded to the arrests and charges Warning to the Vatican.
He named the pastor Yannick Poligne, adding: “I understand and can assure you that I am determined to act.”
A church-backed investigation that reported its findings last year found that an estimated 216,000 minors had been abused by clergy over the past seven decades.
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