The Catholic Church knew as early as 2021 about allegations of sexual abuse against a beloved French humanitarian priest, the late Abbe Pierre, members of an independent commission said Saturday.

Abbe Pierre, or Henri Groues, was a Capuchin monk and ordained Catholic clergyman who died in 2007 at the age of 94. He left a legacy as a friend to the poor and founder of the charities Emmaus and the Abbe Pierre Foundation.

He was appreciated for his uncompromising attitude towards the homeless and other people living on the fringes of society in France, and was regularly voted the most popular public figure in the country in polls.

However, on Wednesday it was announced that seven women had filed complaints of sexual abuse or intimidation by the elderly cleric, from 1970 to 2005.

On Saturday, four investigators from an independent commission investigating sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church said they had already submitted testimonies to the Church in October 2021 accusing the pastor of sexual abuse.

“Of the approximately 1,200 testimonies that our team processed, three concerned Abbot Pierre,” the four researchers wrote in an article in Le Monde.

One of them “very likely” matches testimony B in the report published on Wednesday, about events that took place in Naumur, Belgium, in the early 1980s.

In that testimony, a woman accuses Groues of fondling her breasts and sticking his tongue in her mouth.

– ‘Criminal’ acts –

For the four researchers, the work of the two reports showed that “Abbot Pierre’s sexual coercion, which led to recurrent abuse, appears undeniable.”

Abbot Pierre “had committed acts contrary to the general rules of courtesy, morality, penal law and ecclesiastical regulations,” they added.

Some 17 years after his death, Groues is still a familiar face on posters in charity shops and metro stations, where he urges the French to think of the poor.

At the age of 18, he gave away his inheritance to join the Capuchin order. He later became active in the resistance against the Nazi occupation and spent several years after the war as a member of parliament.

In 1949 he founded the Emmaus Community, which promotes self-help books for excluded people. This community has since spread to dozens of countries.

He also supported the soup kitchen movement “Restos du coeur” and came into conflict with city authorities who did not provide shelter to the homeless.

The commission presented its findings to the French episcopate in October 2021. It estimated that around 330,000 people had been abused within the church when they were minors over the past 70 years.