LONDON (ONTARIO, CANADA)
London Free Press
August 21, 2020
By Jane Sims
[Includes the important December 6, 2018 video statement by Irene Deschenes, announcing that she had won a court challenge to re-open a civil suit against the Catholic Church.]
Once again, the Roman Catholic Diocese of London, as Irene Deschenes said, isn’t ready to “do the right thing.”
You could set your watch this week for when the diocese would drop its application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, hoping to overturn a lower court decision allowing the sexual abuse survivor to reopen her two-decades-old civil case.
Deschenes had already brushed away any fleeting thought that the church might back off so she could move forward. The application arrived right at deadline.
“It’s painful enough to try to recover from the effects of sexual abuse by a Roman Catholic priest,” said Deschenes, 58, at her news conference Thursday.
“It’s more painful to recover from the effects of legal bullying that the church and their lawyers put victims through again and again.”
The church hasn’t offered any comment, but if it thinks all this legal effort will stop Deschenes, one of Canada’s most fearless survivors of sexual abuse by a priest, it should think again.
Deschenes is both a victim and whistleblower of prolific pedophile Charles Sylvestre, the defrocked priest who died at 84 in 2007, months into his three-year sentence for indecently assaulting 47 little girls over four decades in Windsor, London, Sarnia, Chatham and Pain Court.
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