[1] Both French prosecutors and the Holy See launched investigations, though criminal proceedings were dropped in February 2023 because the statute of limitations had expired.

[13] In 2006, as president of the French Bishops Conference, Ricard objected to the recent authorization of the use of human embryos for scientific research in France and elsewhere in Europe.

[14] In 2009 Ricard told the newspaper La Croix that the Pope Benedict wanted to reconcile all Catholics by allowing a wider use of the Traditional Latin Mass, which does not undermine the achievements of Vatican Council II.

[20] On 8 March 2014, he was named by Pope Francis to serve as a member of the newly established Council for Economic Affairs, intended to oversee the work of the new Secretariat for the Economy, the financial regulatory agency for the departments of the Roman Curia.

He said its seminarians can continue their studies and spiritual formation in Toulouse or Rome and that the closure was part of a national assessment of the country's many small seminaries.

[30] On 10 February 2022, Ricard was named papal delegate for the Foyers de charité, an organization subject to oversight by the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life following disclosures in 2020 of sexual abuse committed by one of its founders.

[31] Prompted by the February 2022 announcement that Ricard had been charged with supervising a religious organization where sexual abuses had occurred, a 50-year-old woman contacted the president of the Conference of men and women religious of France, Véronique Margron, and reported that Ricard, a close friend of her family at the time, had subjected her to sexual abuse in the 1980s when he was working as a priest in Marseilles.

This anonymous woman's parents, motivated by the same report of Richard's appointment as apostolic delegate in February, wrote a letter about Ricard's behavior to the bishop of Nice.

[33] When the bishop of Nice[c] eventually learned how young Ricard's victim had been, he forwarded her parents' letter to civil authorities in October.

[2] On 7 November 2022, Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, Archbishop of Reims and president of the French Bishops Conference, released a statement in which Ricard admitted abusing a 14-year-old girl when he was a parish priest in the 1980s: "My behaviour has inevitably led to grave and lasting consequences for this person."

[32] Margron also said she feared Ricard was minimizing what he had done, that she expected the Church to take disciplinary action and that he should be denied his right as a cardinal to participate in a papal election.