A priest from the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius in the country, in Switzerland and Spain.
The Gap court attached his sentence to a deferred committal warrant – the date of incarceration to be set within four months maximum –, four years of socio-judicial monitoring and a ban on salaried or volunteer in contact with minors.
This fundamentalist Catholic who has lived in a monastery located in the Hautes-Alpes since 2021 will also have to compensate the civil parties.
Father Rostand, 58, was found guilty of touching children over whom he had authority as director of a private Catholic school, teacher or head of scout camps. The acts were committed at different posts in France, but also in Switzerland and Spain.
The priest admitted the facts during the hearing at the beginning of April. He assured that he had “always fought against this attraction” to adolescents, for which he has been followed by a psychiatrist since 2019.
He claimed to have alerted the Society of Saint Pius
Remembering a priest with “supreme” authority, a young man, during the hearing, reported being touched in a shower in a scout summer camp in Spain in 2006. Another, who attended school for three years in a school in Courbevoie, in the Paris region, where he worked as director told of “massages on sex” during an outing.
The cleric “took advantage of the respect” due to him and used his “strong authority to put his hand in the pants,” the public prosecutor castigated at the hearing.
Founded in 1970 by the late controversial French bishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Society of Saint Pius six continents, with 590 priests and nearly half a million faithful.
It was the scene of sexual, psychological and physical violence until 2020, the newspaper “Le Temps” reported in January, after an investigation lasting several months.
