TORONTO (ONTARIO, CANADA)
CBC News
February 15, 2020
By Scott Anderson, Lynette Fortune, Mark Kelley
Questions raised over why police and justice officials haven’t pursued church hierarchy
The confession a Quebec priest made just before he died in prison is being used by his victims to try to hold the Catholic Church accountable for decades of child abuse.
Defrocked priest Paul-André Harvey alleged that over a 20-year period when he served in parishes in the Saguenay region, his direct superiors were not only aware of his crimes against children, but they also enabled his abuse and covered up for him.
“I wish to inform you of the circumstances regarding the multiple charges of sexual assault over a period of 20 years,” Harvey wrote in 2017. “I was a priest in many parishes in the diocese of Chicoutimi. My victims were female minors.”
The lawyer for the archdiocese of Chicoutimi dismissed the confession in La Presse as “the lonely tale of a deceased pedophile who, sadly, will never be cross-examined.”
But an investigation by CBC’s The Fifth Estate and the Radio-Canada program Enquête into Harvey’s years of unchecked child abuse raises wider questions about why police and justice officials have not pursued the church hierarchy in Canada.
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