Metropolitan Dimitrios Ploumis, the head of the Orthodox Church in France, has announced an internal investigation into child abuse at a monastery.
Three brothers told Liberation newspaper that they had been repeatedly raped at the Orthodox monastery of Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Dalmerie in the late 1970s when they were children.
During the interview with the Liberation newspaper, they revealed that they were eight, 10 and 12 years old respectively when they had been abused.
In response, the head of the Orthodox Church in France Metropolitan Dimitrios “Reading this article and the information it contains, their statement is well-founded.”
Promising to seek and establish the truth, Dimitrios highlighted that the alleged assaults happened too long ago to be prosecuted in the French courts.
“That is why we are committed to conducting an open and transparent investigation into this monastery, its past and its present.”
Previously, a major investigation released found that French clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years.
After a series of sexual abuse scandals around the world, the bombshell report rocked the Roman Catholic Church.
Pointing out that the church needed to reform the way it approached those issues to rebuild trust with society, the report revealed that its practices on sexuality and sanctity created blind spots which were exploited by the clergy.
Between 1970 and 2015, the Catholic Church had received more than 900 complaints involving over 3,000 instances of child sex abuse in England and Wales.
(With inputs from agencies)
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