chargement...
Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, the Archbishop of Rabat, is facing allegations of sexual assault after at least five women accused him of inappropriate conduct. On Tuesday, the 74-year-old Spanish cardinal announced he was temporarily stepping aside from public ministry while the Vatican conducts a preliminary investigation. According to AFP and Reuters, López Romero, who has led the Archdiocese of Rabat since 2018, has denied the allegations, saying he committed «neither assault nor violence nor sexual harassment».
His case has also brought renewed attention to several abuse investigations involving Catholic priests who served in Morocco in recent years, ranging from ongoing criminal investigations to a priest who spent decades in the kingdom as a fugitive.
Among the most prominent is Father Antoine Exelmans, a French priest who headed the migrant reception service at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Church in Casablanca between 2021 and 2024. In 2025, he became the subject of a criminal investigation after allegations that he had sexually abused migrant and refugee minors over a period of at least four years. A complaint was filed with the Casablanca Court of Appeal prosecutor in May 2024, and six alleged victims, five Guineans and one Cameroonian, all minors at the time of the alleged abuse, were identified.
Le Monde later reported that, according to the Diocese of Rennes, Exelmans acknowledged the abuse during a preliminary canonical investigation, the findings of which were forwarded to the Vatican. Moroccan authorities also opened a criminal investigation, while French police questioned the priest.
From Rabat to Tangier
Another priest whose time in Morocco has come under scrutiny is Father Yves Grosjean, who served in Rabat between 2017 and 2024. The French priest was placed under formal investigation and detained in France in 2025 over allegations of sexually assaulting a minor in France, and has since admitted to three additional acts committed there.
According to La Croix, French judges later requested Morocco's judicial cooperation after allegations emerged concerning the years he spent in Rabat, prompting an international request for assistance to the Moroccan authorities. Grosjean has denied committing any sexual assaults during his time in Morocco.
The earliest widely publicized case linked to Morocco is that of Arthur Perrault, a former American Catholic priest. Unlike the previous cases, however, the crimes for which Perrault was convicted were not alleged to have been committed in Morocco. Rather, the kingdom served as his refuge after he fled the United States in the early 1990s.
Perrault spent more than two decades living in Tangier, where he worked as an English teacher before being arrested by Moroccan authorities in 2017 and extradited the following year. In 2019, a federal court in New Mexico sentenced him to 30 years in prison for sexually abusing a nine-year-old altar boy. Prosecutors argued that he had abused numerous minors over several decades before escaping to Morocco.
