A French cardinal said on Monday that he had abused a 14-year-old girl in the 1980s, making him the first Catholic churchman of his rank to admit to personally abusing a minor.
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, a former archbishop of Bordeaux and former president of the French Bishops Conference, said in a statement that he had “behaved in a reprehensible manner with a 14-year-old girl” 35 years earlier when he was serving as a priest.