By Michael Valpy and Tu Thanh Ha
The Globe and Mail
April 16, 2010
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/new-vatican-directive-highlights-past-failures-in-handling-abuse-cases/article1537708/
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| Pope Benedict XVI holds his pastoral staff as he leaves St. Peter's Square at the Vatican at the end of the open-air Palm Sunday Mass, Sunday, April 9, 2006. AP |
Without clear policy to the contrary 20 years ago, church authorities were able to hush up priest’s sex assaults
The Vatican for the first time this week published an explicit directive to Roman Catholic bishops to report suspected clerical sex assaults to civil authorities.
The injunction – coming in the midst of the continuing international furor over the church’s management of abuse of young people by its priests – brings into sharp relief how the case of former Ontario priest Bernard Prince was handled 20 years ago. In a rigidly hierarchical institution like the Catholic Church, without clear Vatican policy to the contrary, Canadian Catholic authorities and Vatican officials as late as 1993 tried to hush up reports of Mr. Prince’s sexual behaviour.
Such was the case even though psychiatrists and psychologists advising the North American church were saying by the mid-1980s that sex abuse of minors was a deep pathology beyond reach of available therapy, and priests identified as predators should not be allowed access to young people.
By the end of that decade, Catholic jurisdictions where Mr. Prince had worked had protocols in place governing how allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy were to be dealt with internally and reported to state agencies. At the same time, Mr. Prince’s superiors heard that one of his victims was plotting to murder him because of the pain he’d caused.
As well, Ontario put legislation in place requiring professionals – specifically including priests – to report to authorities if they believed “on reasonable grounds that a child is or may be in need of protection.”
The legislation meant there did not have to be a complaint from a victim. And as Toronto criminal lawyer Frank Addario notes, the spirit of the legislation argues for protecting not only existing victims but future victims, meaning it didn’t matter if the identified victim was no longer a child. What mattered is whether a priest suspected of being a sexual predator still had access to children.
Mr. Prince, now defrocked and in jail, was arrested in 2006 and convicted of sexually assaulting 13 boys.
Court documents that recently have come to light – part of civil suits against Mr. Prince and the Diocese of Pembroke, Ont., whose bishop had primary jurisdiction over him – show that Vatican and Canadian church officials kept quiet about his behaviour for years before police got wind of the allegations against him.
The documents show that the church took steps that would enable the diocese to argue today that it dealt with the matter properly. But they also show that diocesan officials fretted about keeping the matter private at a time when the church was buffeted by scandals.
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| Toronto Archbishop, Thomas Collins. Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail |
One of the civil suit’s plaintiffs is the man who wanted to kill Mr. Prince. He came to the diocese’s attention through a tip from his girlfriend’s family, according to an unsigned diocesan letter of August, 1990, filed in the suit.
“Unfortunately the girlfriend’s sister works for the penitentiary system and she appears to be urging the family to expose the priest,” the letter said. “The father, however, appears to be more docile.”
Mr. Prince was then working in Toronto. In an online essay, the man wrote that he changed his mind about killing the priest and instead confronted him. “He begged for my forgiveness after I told him of the hatred I had for him and the pain and suffering he had caused.”
The man was then contacted by a delegate from the diocese, Rev. John Green, who apologized on behalf of the church. In an October, 1990, report, Father Green wrote that the man was offered counselling and a job.
The man didn’t want to file a complaint because Mr. Prince had been helpful to his mother. Father Green noted, however, that the man’s sister had reported Mr. Prince to the Toronto Children’s Aid Society.
The diocese is arguing that this shows the matter was handled correctly.
In November of 1990, Mr. Prince agreed to be examined at Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. He signed a waiver allowing the Pembroke bishop, the late Joseph Windle, and the archbishop of Toronto, the future cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, to see the results.
By early January, Mr. Prince was offered a job at the Vatican, to give him “another chance since it would remove him from the Canadian scene,” Bishop Windle would write.
Hard on the heels of this week’s Vatican directive, Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins, head of the largest church jurisdiction in Canada, issued a message to be read on Sunday from the pulpits of all 225 parishes in the archdiocese.
Archbishop Collins’s message says that, although the archdiocesan protocol for dealing with reports of sexual misconduct by priests complies with all Canadian and Ontario laws, he will commission a committee of expert laypersons to examine whether it can be made more effective.
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