CANADA
The News
Adam MacInnis
Published on December 11, 2015
How do you know when a story someone is telling you is true? As a journalist, it’s something I struggle with often. This story is about two people and events that happened in the mid 1980s. Only they know the truth – Lewis Stevens and a man he alleges abused him. What further complicates the situation is the second man is dead. Perhaps some would remember him as a godly man – ‘a gentleman’ as one described him. Stevens remembers him as an alcoholic, an abuser. Officially, though, the man was never charged and there was no other allegation of abuse made against him that I could find record of.
The intent of this article is not to let a pall of suspicion fall on all who served faithfully in the area during those years.
But silence is never an answer to possible sins of the past. The Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal of the last century taught us that.
This alleged chapter begins inside a Pictou County church.
Lewis Stevens recalls the smell of cigarettes blended with hard liquor. The odour is in his face, over his neck, emanating from an unlikely source – the priest of his church.
But as Stevens would learn, this Father is not what anyone would expect a man of God to be.
Growing up in Pictou County in the 1980s, Stevens was a typical boy of a religious family who was actively involved in the local parish. His mother attended faithfully, was a member of the Catholic Women’s League and at times worked there. His family members were baptized there, and he had the role of altar server. For some the church in those days held heavy sway over their lives; it controlled man’s most precious possession – his soul.
The church was a place Stevens loved. For a time he thought he might like to go into ministry. But something changed him – someone.
Stevens was like many other teens looking for money, and considered himself fortunate to get work doing odd jobs at the church – shoveling snow off the steps in the winter and mowing the lawns in the summer. Everything was normal about it.
But it soon began to drift from typical to troubling.
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