OTTAWA (CANADA)
Ottawa Citizen [Ottawa, Ontario, Canada]
August 22, 2022
By Andrew Duffy
Sylvia MacEachern said she will no longer update the site or allow people to post comments because of concerns that she “may be doing more harm than good.”
An Ottawa woman who has devoutly catalogued the clergy sexual abuse scandal in Canada for more than a decade has decided to shut down her encyclopedic blog known as Sylvia’s Site.
In a recent post, Sylvia MacEachern said she will no longer update the site or allow people to post comments because of concerns that she “may be doing more harm than good.”
MacEachern, a practising Catholic, said she has been deeply pained to see “diocese after diocese” forced to sell off churches to settle victims’ damage claims.
“Countless good, decent Roman Catholics are suffering because a diocese was sued for the sins and crimes of defiant, deviant priests who, in pursuing their own perverted passions, betrayed the faithful entrusted to their care, their fellow priests, the church, and God,” MacEachern wrote.
Last month, the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador approved the sale of 13 Catholic churches in that province to pay for the settlement of damage claims by sexual abuse victims at the Mount Cashel Orphanage. The St. John’s orphanage was operated by the Christian Brothers, an all-male religious order sanctioned by the Catholic Church.
MacEachern said she has not yet decided whether to remove Sylvia’s Site from the internet or to leave some of it up as an archive.
The site has become an online gathering place for clergy sexual assault victims and an important database for victims seeking information about abusive priests in the Catholic Church.
It’s also one of the few resources that offers insight into the scope of Canada’s clergy sexual abuse scandal.
In the United States, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has identified 7,002 clergy members “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting minors between 1950 and 2018. In Australia, a royal commission identified 4,444 victims of child sexual abuse, based on Catholic Church data, between 1980 and 2015.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has not made such information available, but Sylvia’s Site has served as a clearinghouse of information regarding the clergy sexual abuse scandal in this country.
The website has an alphabetical listing of clergy members publicly accused of crimes. More than 350 names appear on it.
MacEachern, a grandmother who lives in Fitzroy Harbour, said she will continue to pray for the healing and salvation of all clergy abuse victims.
“I realize that many of you will not understand why I am taking this step or be angry,” MacEachern said in her blog post. “I have never wanted to inflict further pain on any one of you. I love you as a mother loves her children: It is precisely for that reason however that I must take this step.”
A deeply conservative Catholic who once opposed the addition of AIDS education to the Catholic school curriculum, MacEachern launched Sylvia’s Site in 2010.
She documented clergy abuse, MacEachern said, to protect children by ensuring Catholic parishioners had the means to learn about suspected predators, and to pressure church officials into removing sexual offenders from the priesthood.
MacEachern first began to write about clergy sexual abuse as the editor of The Orator, a small publication aimed at Canadian Catholics. She blogged during the Cornwall Inquiry into child sexual abuse, and was a regular visitor to the Ottawa courthouse to follow the cases of local priests accused of abuse.
She has communicated with hundreds of sexual assault victims from across the country during the past 12 years.
“You will have a grown man or woman who one day decides to Google the name of their priest molester,” MacEachern once told an interviewer. “Most of them can’t explain why. They hit the site and discover, ‘Gosh, he’s already been charged and convicted.’ ‘Gosh, he’s dead, but there have been several lawsuits.’ They suddenly realize, ‘I am not the only one.’ ”
Late last year, MacEachern underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumour on her left kidney. A recent CT scan found no sign of the cancer, she said.