ROME (AP) — The Vatican said Friday it has decided to launch a preliminary sex abuse investigation into a prominent French cardinal after he admitted to having behaved in a “reprehensible way” with a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said a search was under way to find a lead investigator with the “necessary autonomy, impartiality and experience.”

Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, the retired archbishop of Bordeaux and a former president of the French bishops’ conference, announced the abuse in a letter last week while French bishops were meeting at their annual assembly in Lourdes. The revelation further sparked a crisis within the French Catholic Church, which has been reeling over revelations of decades of abuse and cover-ups detailed in a groundbreaking report last year.

Marseille prosecutors announced this week they had opened an investigation into Ricard but that “no complaint” had yet been filed against the cardinal.

The decision by the Vatican to go ahead and open its own investigation suggested the seriousness of the matter in Rome. Ricard has a very high ranking: he is a voting member on the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, meaning he has been involved in adjudicating other clergy sex abuse cases for years.

There was no word on whether he would be suspended or removed from his Vatican memberships. Ricard said in his letter he was placing himself at the discretion of church and civil authorities.

France's Sauve report estimated that 330,000 children in France were sexually abused over the past 70 years by some 3,000 priests and other people in the church and that the crimes were covered up in a “systemic manner” by the church hierarchy.