TORONTO (ONTARIO, CANADA)
The Globe and Mail from Canadian Press
November 25, 2020
By Sidhartha Banerjee
Montreal’s archdiocese did little to address complaints against a pedophile priest and seemed more interested in protecting his reputation than his victims, according to an independent review released Wednesday.
Former Quebec Superior Court justice Pepita G. Capriolo’s report highlighted numerous deficiencies in the church’s response to complaints against Brian Boucher. The priest was sentenced in March, 2019, to eight years in prison for abusing two boys.
“Secrecy is everywhere in this file,” Ms. Capriolo wrote in her report. “Secret archives, secret hiding places for sensitive documents and documents so secret they have been eliminated completely.”
Ms. Capriolo told a news conference Wednesday the church improperly handled complaints against Mr. Boucher from the 1980s to the end of 2015. “Yet Boucher’s inexcusable behaviour had been the subject of a slew of complaints from the very start of his career in the church.”
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