Canada’s Inuit seek Pope’s help to return accused priest from France

Pope Francis waves as he leads the Angelus prayer from his window, at the Vatican July 17, 2022.

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Canada’s Inuit people will press Pope Francis to help return a retired Roman Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse to face charges in Canada, a former political leader in the country’s North said.

Francis plans to visit Canada July 24-29 to apologize for abuses of indigenous children in government schools largely run by the Catholic church.

Retired priest Johannes Rivoire, 93, is charged with sexual assault related to his work in northern parishes for the Catholic congregation Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. The charge against Rivoire, who lives in Lyon, France, was laid by Canadian police in February.

A woman alleged that Rivoire sexually assaulted her between 1974 and 1979, when she was a young girl. Neither the charge nor any allegations against Rivoire have been proven in court.

Rivoire, who has French and Canadian citizenship, did not respond to a request for comment Reuters made through France’s Oblates.

The woman who alleged the assault, now a grandmother, said to this day she does not like Sundays, when her abuse often took place. She keeps her hair short, remembering that her abuser would pull the long hair she had as a girl, to keep her quiet.

“I’m hoping (Francis) can help,” the woman told Reuters. “We’re Inuit, we have feelings too. We’re hurt from inside to outside.”

Identities of sexual assault victims are protected by Canadian courts.

Inuit have long alleged that Rivoire sexually abused children during his work in northern Canada from the 1960s to 1993.

Police laid three sex-related charges against Rivoire in 1998, but by then he had left for France. Canada’s Justice Department dropped those charges in 2017 concluding there was little chance of conviction given his departure.

Father Vincent Gruber, who leads France’s Oblates, said the group has asked Rivoire over the years to deal with the charges against him but he has refused.

Piita Irniq, 75, a former Nunavut politician, said he will use the five minutes he is scheduled with the Pope in Iqaluit next Friday to raise Rivoire’s case.

Irniq’s childhood friend, Marius Tungilik, said he was sexually abused by clergy, including Rivoire, as a boy in what’s now Naujaat, Nunavut.

The trauma drove Tungilik to drink heavily, leading to his 2012 death, Irniq said.

“He used alcohol to try and heal from what happened.”

The extradition treaty between Canada and France states that neither country is bound to extradite its own nationals. A spokesperson for Canada’s Justice Department declined to comment on whether Canada asked France to extradite Rivoire.

France’s foreign ministry and justice ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

“We urge Johannes Rivoire to do what he should have done long ago, cooperate with police and make himself available for the legal process,” said Father Ken Thorson, leader of OMI Lacombe, one of Canada’s Oblates groups.

A Vatican spokesperson said he needed to seek more information about Rivoire.

Complete Article HERE!

FBI Opens Molestation Probe Into NOLA Archdiocese

Archbishop Gregory Aymond conducts the procession to lead a live streamed Easter Mass in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, Sunday, April 12, 2020. The FBI has opened a widening investigation into Roman Catholic sex abuse in New Orleans, looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them. The FBI declined to comment, as did the Louisiana State Police, which is assisting in the inquiry. The Archdiocese of New Orleans declined to discuss the federal investigation. “I’d prefer not to pursue this conversation,” Aymond told AP.

By JIM MUSTIAN

The FBI has opened a widening investigation into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans going back decades, a rare federal foray into such cases looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them, officials and others familiar with the inquiry told The Associated Press.

More than a dozen alleged abuse victims have been interviewed this year as part of the probe that’s exploring among other charges whether predator priests can be prosecuted under the Mann Act, a more than century-old, anti-sex trafficking law that prohibits taking anyone across state lines for illicit sex.

Some of the New Orleans cases under review allege abuse by clergy during trips to Mississippi camps or amusement parks in Texas and Florida. And while some claims are decades old, Mann Act violations notably have no statute of limitations.

“It’s been a long road and just the fact that someone this high up believes us means the world to us,” said a former altar boy who alleged his assailant took him on trips to Colorado and Florida and abused him beginning in the 1970s when he was in the fifth grade. The AP generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

The FBI declined to comment, as did the Louisiana State Police, which is assisting in the inquiry. The Archdiocese of New Orleans declined to discuss the federal investigation.

“I’d prefer not to pursue this conversation,” Archbishop Gregory Aymond told the AP.

The probe could deepen the legal peril for the archdiocese as it reels from a bankruptcy brought on by a flood of sex abuse lawsuits and allegations that church leaders turned a blind eye to generations of predator priests.

Federal investigators are now considering whether to seek access to thousands of secret church documents produced by lawsuits and shielded by a sweeping confidentiality order in the bankruptcy, according to those familiar with the probe who weren’t authorized to discuss it and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. Those records are said to document years of abuse claims, interviews with accused clergy and a pattern of church leaders transferring problem priests without reporting their crimes to law enforcement.

The FBI opened a widening investigation into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans going back decades, a rare federal foray into such cases looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them.

“This is actually a big deal, and it should be heartening to victims,” said Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor and chief executive of Child USA, a think tank focused on preventing child abuse. “The FBI has rarely become involved in the clergy sex abuse scandals. They’ve dragged their feet around the country with respect to the Catholic Church.”

The U.S. Justice Department has struggled to find a federal nexus to prosecuting clergy abuse, hitting dead ends in cases as explosive as the ones outlined in the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report that disclosed a systematic cover-up by church leaders. Federal prosecutors subpoenaed church records in Buffalo, New York, the same year in an inquiry that similarly went quiet.

“The issue has always been determining what is the federal crime,” said Peter G. Strasser, the former U.S. attorney in New Orleans who declined to bring charges in 2018 after the archdiocese published a list of 57 “credibly accused” clergy, a roster an AP analysis found had been undercounted by at least 20 names.

Strasser said he “naively” believed a federal case might be possible only to encounter a host of roadblocks, including the complexities of “putting the church on trial” for charges like conspiracy.

But federal prosecutors have in recent years employed the more narrowly focused Mann Act to win convictions in a variety of abuse cases, including against R&B star R. Kelly for using his fame to sexually exploit girls, and Ghislaine Maxwell for helping financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls. In 2013, a federal judge in Indiana sentenced a Baptist pastor to 12 years in prison for taking a 16-year-old girl across state lines for sex.

Among the priests under federal scrutiny in New Orleans is Lawrence Hecker, a 90-year-old removed from the ministry in 2002 following accusations he abused “countless children.” Hecker is accused of abusing children decades ago on out-of-state trips, and other claims against him range from fondling to rape.

Hundreds of records currently under the confidentiality order “will reveal in no uncertain terms that the last four archbishops of New Orleans knew that Lawrence Hecker was a serial child predator,” Richard Trahant, an attorney for Hecker’s alleged victims, wrote in a court filing.

“Hecker is still very much alive, vibrant, lives alone and is a danger to young boys until he draws his final breath,” Trahant wrote.

Asked by telephone this week whether he ever abused children, Hecker said, “I’m going to have to hang up.”

More recent allegations are also drawing federal attention, including the case of Patrick Wattigny, a priest charged last year by state prosecutors after he admitted molesting a teenager in 2013. His attorney declined to comment.

Wattigny’s 2020 removal from the ministry came amid a disciplinary investigation into inappropriate text messages he sent a student. The case sent shockwaves through the Catholic community because church leaders had frequently characterized clergy abuse as a sin from the past.

“It was happening while the church was saying, ‘It’s no longer happening,’” said Bill Arata, an attorney who has attended three of the FBI interviews.

“These victims could stay home and not do anything,” he added, “but that’s not the kind of people they are.”

Clergy abuse is particularly fraught in Louisiana, a heavily Catholic state that endured some of the earliest scandals dating to the 1980s. Last year, it joined two-dozen states that have enacted “lookback windows” intended to allow unresolved claims of child sex abuse, no matter how old, to be brought in civil court.

But with few exceptions, most notably a former deacon charged with rape, the accused clergy have escaped criminal consequences. Even at the local level, cases have been hamstrung by statutes of limitation and the political sensitivity of prosecuting the church.

The archdiocese’s 2020 bankruptcy case has also frozen a separate court battle over a cache of confidential emails describing the behind-the-scenes public relations work that executives for the NFL’s New Orleans Saints did for the archdiocese in 2018 and 2019 to contain fallout from clergy abuse scandals.

While the Saints say they only assisted in messaging, attorneys for those suing the church have alleged in court records that Saints officials joined in the church’s “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.” That included taking an active role in helping to shape the archdiocese’s list of credibly accused clergy, the attorneys contend.

Attorneys for those suing the church have attacked the bankruptcy bid as a veiled attempt to keep church records secret — and deny victims a public reckoning.

“Those victims were on the path to the truth,” Soren Gisleson, an attorney who represents several of the victims, wrote in a court filing. “The rape of children is a thief that keeps on stealing.”

Complete Article HERE!

Altar boys who testified at a priest’s trial say bishop also abused them

Two brothers allege that Gary Mercure, a former priest convicted of raping boys in Massachusetts, had sexually abused them with former Albany bishop

Bishop Howard J. Hubbard

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Two brothers who grew up in Warren County in a devout Catholic family allege that Gary Mercure, a former priest in their childhood parish who was later convicted of raping young boys in Massachusetts, had sexually abused them on multiple occasions over a period of years and that ex-Albany Bishop Howard J. Hubbard took part in some of the assaults.

In a series of recent interviews with the Times Union, the brothers recounted years of sexual abuse at the hands of Mercure beginning in the mid-1980s. They also had detailed those allegations when they testified at Mercure’s 2011 criminal trial in Pittsfield, where the former priest was sentenced to two decades in prison following his conviction on charges of raping two altar boys.

The men, now in their 40s, for the first time are publicly asserting that Mercure and Hubbard sexually abused the older brother on multiple occasions during encounters at Lake George motels, in the rectory of Our Lady of Annunciation in Queensbury, and in Mercure’s vehicle in Albany.

“The bishop forcefully denies the allegations; he’s never abused these gentlemen, never met these gentlemen, never abused anyone, whether it be a minor or an adult,” said Terence P. O’Connor, an Albany attorney whose firm is representing Hubbard in the sexual abuse cases. “The bishop wholeheartedly denies these allegations. He’s never abused either of these boys. He’s never abused anybody.”

The younger brother said he was sexually abused once by Hubbard, but that he — like his brother — had been sexually assaulted hundreds of times by Mercure beginning when they were about 8 years old and continuing into their high school years. Numerous other men, many of them former altar boys who worked alongside Mercure, also have leveled sexual abuse allegations against him.

The brothers asked to remain anonymous for this story. The Times Union does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse without their consent.

The older brother said that “looking back on it now, it was almost as if Mercure was setting me up for the bishop to take over … especially going down to Albany or when the bishop would come into Lake George and come visit Mercure (at motels).”

Mercure had a close relationship with Hubbard, who has visited the former priest at the Massachusetts prison where he is serving his 20- to 25-year sentence, according to law enforcement sources.

The alleged abuse involving the bishop that took place in the rectory at Our Lady of Annunciation in Queensbury — a location where Mercure was also accused of sexually abusing other young boys — usually occurred in connection with events such as Christmas Mass or confirmation ceremonies. The older brother said Mercure would often ply him with money and alcohol, an allegation made by other alleged victims.

“John French, the pastor at that church, was constantly at odds with Mercure because kids — boys — were coming in and out of that rectory at Annunciation, and he had a strict policy that we were not supposed to be in that rectory,” the older brother said. “So Mercure went out of his way to make sure that French was out of there or gone when him and Hubbard were there doing their thing.”

He said that Mercure on occasion drove him to Albany and they would pick up Hubbard and drive into a park — he described a setting that appeared to resemble Washington Park — and pick up male prostitutes or men interested in having sex with strangers. He said those men would never have sex with him, but that Mercure and Hubbard would perform sexual acts in front of him.

He said that during the car trips to Albany, when he said he was also occasionally sexually abused by the priest and bishop, “I never was allowed inside where the bishop was. … I was always in the car or he would meet us someplace, sometimes a restaurant … but I could never go into the chancery.”

The older brother said that during the alleged encounters at Lake George motels, Hubbard maintained a low profile but Mercure often went out in public dressed like a tourist and without wearing his clergy collar. He said there were multiple sexual encounters in those motels involving the bishop, who would then leave quickly. The older brother said Mercure would sometimes hand him hundreds of dollars or take him out to dinner after the alleged incidents.

During one of the visits, the older brother said, Mercure and Hubbard got into an argument after they ran into people who knew Mercure. “The bishop was saying it was drawing too much attention — ‘You’re asking for trouble,’ ” the older brother recalled. “Hubbard had made comments that I overheard about how careless Mercure was about all this.”

Years to process

The new allegations against Hubbard have increased the number of individuals accusing him of sexual abuse to at least nine — seven of whom have filed lawsuits against the former bishop, the Catholic church or the Albany diocese. The lawsuits, among hundreds pending against the diocese, were filed under New York’s Child Victims Act, which lifted the statute of limitations for two years to give alleged victims the opportunity to sue their abusers or the institutions that may have harbored them.

O’Connor, Hubbard’s attorney, noted that an attorney for the brothers had reported their allegations against Mercure to the diocese in 2008, but had never told the organization about the allegations against Hubbard, including in the ensuing years when that attorney negotiated to have their counseling fees paid by the church.

“I would think that would have been a ripe time to raise the allegations,” O’Connor said. He highlighted another man’s allegation that Hubbard had abused him on a bus during halftime of an Army-Navy game at West Point Academy. O’Connor noted that before 2020, Army and Navy had not played a game at West Point since the 1940s.

The older brother said that in 2008, their family was in the midst of his father’s decadelong battle with a health condition that would later cause his death. He said O’Connor may not understand the complexities of suppressing the memories of childhood sexual abuse and dealing with a diocese that had never reached out to apologize to the many victims that Mercure was accused of raping when they were children.

He said that after he and his brother testified at Mercure’s criminal trial in Massachusetts, diocesan representatives, including two who attended the trial, did not thank them for their testimony that had helped secure the former priest’s conviction. He said that when Hubbard conducted a “healing” mass at Our Lady of Annunciation in Queensbury following Mercure’s criminal trial, the bishop never mentioned the victims — even though much of the sexual abuse occurred in an adjacent room.

“You have a man that’s been accused of multiple allegations throughout the years and the best question that (his) attorney has is, ‘Why didn’t they tell us about this sooner?’ ” the older brother said. “Not one time has there been any call from the bishop or anyone high up in that diocese apologizing or saying, ‘Thank you for getting up there and testifying and helping put this guy away where he belongs, because this is something we should have stopped years ago.’ ”

He said it’s noteworthy that Hubbard, who has acknowledged concealing clergy abuse and returning abusive priests to ministry after they had received counseling, has visited Mercure in prison but never reached out to the alleged victims of Mercure’s abuse.

There was an earlier — but cryptic — disclosure to the diocese about his allegation against Hubbard: The older brother’s claim of a second clergy member abusing him was shared with the diocese in 2014, when his attorney notified Michael L. Costello, the longtime attorney for the diocese, of a second abuser that the brother did not want to identify, according to letters exchanged between the attorneys.

The brothers’ attorney at that time, Tina Weber, said the older brother was not ready to come forward then about his allegations against Hubbard and, apparently because of that, Costello cut off communication with her for about two years. Costello, in a 2016 letter to Weber, noted he had raised concerns that the unidentified clergy member could victimize others, and he cited a memorandum of understanding between the diocese and New York’s district attorneys that required the church to notify them of any new sexual abuse allegations.

The older brother said that even though the diocese paid him and his brother $90,000 each in 2016 to cover their counseling, that agreement — which did not include compensation for “pain and suffering” — came only after they had endured years of the diocese allegedly failing to pay for their therapy sessions in a timely manner. The delays often required their attorney to have to call and demand payments be made. In addition, he said, the diocese tried to pressure them to sign a release enabling the church to receive copies of their therapists’ notes and other treatment records.

“They’re asking me to come forward and other people to come forward when Hubbard was still bishop? What do you think is going to happen?” the older brother said. “And their track record isn’t very good for how they’ve handled these accusations before in the past.”

The brothers said that when the allegations against Mercure were made public more than 14 years ago, they interpreted many of the public statements made by diocesan officials as implying that his sexual abuse of children involved isolated incidents and that his alleged victims were teenage boys experimenting with homosexual sex.

“We were getting beat up and lambasted like we did something wrong. We were kids — what did we do wrong?” the older brother said. “Why is Hubbard going down to that prison to visit (Mercure) instead of calling Tina to say, ‘What do your (clients) need?’ … It doesn’t give a victim a very good feeling that it’s OK for me now to come forward.”

‘Bad eggs’

The brothers recently agreed to tell their story publicly, they said, in part because of the manner in which they contend the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany has waged a fierce legal battle to have their Child Victims Act lawsuit against the diocese and Our Lady of Annunciation thrown out of court.

The dismissal, which was affirmed by a mid-level appellate court but may be reviewed by the state Court of Appeals, centered on the diocese’s argument that the pair had relinquished any future claims for the abuse they endured when they signed an agreement in 2016 to receive the $90,000 payments for trauma therapy.

In a letter to their attorney, Costello described the diocese’s practice of requiring a “general release … which is intended to provide partial counseling and associated expenses permitting the victim to advance with healing and their lives.”

But, he added in the letter, “the limited assistance provided covers past/prospective counseling and indirectly recognizes pain and suffering through the counseling. Assistance resolution does not earmark or compensate explicitly for pain and suffering.”

Even though the Child Victims Act at that time had been stalled for years in the state Legislature, and with no indication it would pass, the brothers said they would not have signed that release if they thought it would have barred them from any future claims against the diocese.

“They treated (the brothers) almost like criminals during and after (Mercure’s criminal trial),” Weber said. “What they wanted is periodically to review what was going on, before they would authorize additional counseling sessions, which is why finally at one point (the brothers) said, ‘Can we just settle this somehow?’ That’s how the counseling package came into play: so they never had to deal with the diocese again.”

Kathryn Barrans, a spokeswoman for the diocese, said they have “provided considerable assistance to the victims/survivors in this case.”

“Prior to the settlement reached in 2016 with the victims/survivors and their attorney, the diocese provided payment for ongoing counseling assistance for them and a family member to the health care provider of their choice,” Barrans said. “The settlement, reached with the consent of their attorney, provided an additional $90,000 for each victim/survivor in this case.”

Weber countered that the diocese’s “go-to position has been, and always will be, victim shaming and blaming.”

“It is disingenuous, at best, to now suggest — both in court and in the court of public opinion — that my former clients received fair and just compensation,” Weber said. “It must be understood that the damage caused by the abuse as well as the dismissive actions of the diocese continues to traumatize my former clients on a daily basis.”

Last year, a lawsuit filed anonymously on behalf of a male plaintiff against the diocese and St. Edward the Confessor Roman Catholic Church alleged that in 1977 — the year Hubbard was appointed bishop — he approached the then-11-year-old boy at a carnival at the Clifton Park church and told the boy to accompany him to the rectory, and molested him.

“For a period of time I experienced a lot of anger toward religion, towards God, my beliefs,” the man who filed that lawsuit told the Times Union last year. “And over a period of time, I just realized that there’s just bad eggs. There’s certain people that are just rotten people, and Bishop Hubbard is just one of those people.”

Hubbard, who stepped down as bishop in 2014, issued a statement in response to the man’s lawsuit, saying: “I pray for the anonymous individual who filed this lawsuit that he will know the healing and peace of God’s love and will find the justice and closure he seeks. I know with absolute certainty that I did not abuse him because I know with absolute certainty that I have never abused a child or an adult, sexually or in any other way.”

In the Queensbury case, the younger brother said they were sexually abused by Mercure repeatedly over a period of about a decade beginning in the mid-1980s. He reiterated that Mercure and Hubbard had sexually abused him together only once, and that he and his brother did not know until years later, when they were adults, that they had both been victimized.

When asked why he was coming forward now, he said: “A lot of this is the frustration that there’s been zero accountability in the diocese. No convictions. The Child Victims Act is all smoke and mirrors. Hubbard continues to tell all these lies. It’s really hard to swallow. You get a lot of: ‘Just try to move on. You’re a male. It happened 30 years ago, get over it.’ But the effect it takes on your entire life — relationships, family, anxiety, nightmares.”

‘Dumbfounded’

Mercure was ordained in 1975 and served as a priest or associate pastor at St. Mary’s in Clinton Heights, St. Mary’s in Glens Falls, Our Lady of Annunciation in Queensbury and Our Lady of the Assumption in Latham.

In the mid-1990s, the diocese sent Mercure to a church-run hospital near Philadelphia, St. John Vianney, for undisclosed counseling and what church officials described as a “nervous breakdown.” That facility, according to a 2018 grand jury investigation by the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office, was one of many facilities used by the Catholic church to secretly provide treatment to priests accused of sexually abusing children.

Mercure was visited by the brothers’ family members at St. John Vianney, where they thought he was being treated for anxiety. The parents were close to Mercure at Our Lady of Annunciation, where they had been eucharistic ministers and were unaware at the time of his alleged sexual abuse of their sons. During one of the family’s visits to the Downington, Pa., facility, Mercure allegedly fondled the younger brother after asking him to help carry some reading materials that he had received from the family to his room.

Years later, around 2000, the mother of two former altar boys contacted church officials and reported that her son had told her Mercure had once tried to kiss him on the family’s front porch.

The woman, who lives in another state and spoke to the Times Union several years ago on the condition she not be identified, said she was put in touch with Father Louis Deimeke, a diocese official who later retired.

“He wanted to know ‘What do you want from us?’ ” she said. “I said we don’t want any money. … I’m calling to protect other children.”

She said Deimeke acknowledged they’d “had problems” with Mercure.

Church officials would later say Mercure denied the allegations and resumed his ministry duties in Troy.

The woman said that about a year later she learned Deimeke would be at St. Mary’s Church in Glens Falls. She waited and followed him into the sacistry, where she introduced herself.

“He did not acknowledge me in any way, shape or form,” she said. “He continued to put his coat on and walked out the sacistry door and out of the church. I stood there dumbfounded.”

In 2008, after one her sons learned Mercure was still a priest at an area church affiliated with a school, he contacted then-Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan and recounted years of alleged abuse at Mercure’s hands. On paper, it looked as though the New York statute of limitations barred any prosecution. But Hogan’s office investigated and learned Mercure had raped some of his victims in Massachusetts, where his crimes were not time-barred from prosecution.

Hubbard’s attorney last year told the Times Union that “people have come out of the woodwork” and filed lawsuits because they are looking to get money. The attorney acknowledged at the time that having seven accusers of Hubbard “doesn’t look great” but added that many of the “factual predicates of the lawsuits are completely ridiculous.”

Hubbard’s handling of sexual abuse in the diocese as bishop from 1977 to 2014 faced further scrutiny recently when it was revealed that he had testified under oath in a deposition last year that he and the diocese systematically concealed incidents of child sexual abuse and did not alert law enforcement agencies to avoid scandal and preserve “respect for the priesthood.”

The former bishop also confirmed that many of the records documenting the sexual abuse allegations were kept in secret files that only he and other top church officials could access. He said the “sealed” files included allegations of abuse as well as records on priests accused of other forms of wrongdoing, such as financial misconduct or alcohol abuse.

The deposition, which was released after attorneys removed the names of alleged victims, confirms the efforts by the former bishop and the diocese to conceal incidents of sexual abuse when Hubbard was bishop of the 14-county district.

Hubbard also testified about his reluctance to adopt a “zero-tolerance” policy for child sexual abuse perpetrators, and he acknowledged that despite the diocese keeping the sealed files on priests accused of child sex abuse, he did not review the files kept by his predecessor to confirm whether any priests active in ministry during his tenure were child predators.

“There was a sense in those days that these crimes should be handled with a minimum of publicity that might re-victimize a minor,” Hubbard had said, adding that church leaders’ “failure to notify the parish and the public when a priest was removed or restored was a mistake.”

In Hubbard’s testimony, he acknowledged that Mercure was the only sexually abusive priest he had removed from the clerical state — and that the removal took place only after Mercure had been convicted of rape and sentenced to prison. In an interview with the Times Union roughly a decade ago, Hubbard declined to say why he had never met with Mercure’s victims or their families, but had visited Mercure in prison.

Complete Article HERE!

Residential School Justice Requires More Than Jail Sentences

Marieval Indian Residential School

By James Murray

After an 11-year investigation into abuse at the Fort Alexander residential school, RCMP charged a retired priest on Friday for the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.

The charge against Arthur Masse was hardly a surprise. You don’t have to travel far to hear from survivors who live mostly in Sagkeeng First Nation that conditions at the school were horrific, abuse was rampant and that predators were everywhere.

The only surprise for most of us is that a charge happened at all.

For decades, victims of abuse have told strikingly similar stories about life at Fort Alexander residential school, which was run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate until 1970.

Survivors have shared with their families, clergy, political leaders and police about what they have experienced. Some have even published books, like author Theodore Fontaine, or appeared on the nightly news, like Phil Fontaine did in 1990.

In 2010, when documents corroborating accounts of the abuse came to light, Manitoba RCMP opened up an investigation.

Eleven years, 700 interviews, 80 investigators, and 75 witness and victim statements later, a single charge was announced.

A single charge.

“The question may be asked: Why, with all this work, was there one charge laid and not many?” RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Paul Manaigre told media on Friday. “Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, many of the victims are not able to participate in the investigation, whether that be for mental or physical health reasons, or because the victim is now deceased.”

A far more likely truth is that “authorities” don’t believe survivors.

I know this first hand.

My grandfather experienced brutal abuse at Fort Alexander.

One day, while working in the field, he couldn’t lift a pail of water. When he started crying, the priest beat him so badly in the head he lost much of his hearing on one side.

He was six.

In the basement of the school was a room students who were forced to sit silently for hours on threat of violence or work in dangerous conditions with scalding water in the laundry room.

If anyone acted out — or sometimes for little reason at all — beatings with the “lash” were a regular occurrence, and would take place for all to see.

My uncle Elmer, my grandfather’s older brother who attended alongside him, told our family that some nights boys who had been lashed would cry all night in bed from the pain.

“I often wondered how men and women who professed to be Christians and were serving in religious orders could be so mean and cruel. Their sole purpose seemed to be to break our spirits,” he said.

Then, my uncle said something else about Fort Alexander residential school I’ll never forget.

“I don’t remember ever hearing a kind word during my three-year stay in the school,” he said. “I suppose being brought up in such a cruel and loveless environment affected our later lives.”

This raises the toughest reality to discuss about Fort Alexander residential school: the sexual abuse.

My grandfather experienced it there too, leading to decades of self-harm, alcoholism and his abuse (physically, not sexually) of his own children.

I share these horrific details not because I want to, but because I have to.

It’s a story our family carries.

To change cycles and patterns of violence, I must face this horrific legacy from my life.

This is why survivors should guide our next move.

In this case, the alleged perpetrator is almost finished his life. If found guilty, and if the family of the survivor wants him to go to jail, we should not argue with them.

Most survivors, however, do not want “justice” in the form of jail time but reconciliation for their families, communities and future generations.

The justice system, both provincially and nationally, is sorely inadequate in this regard.

It is not enough to simply charge an old man, but rather to help heal the thousands of lives damaged by the institutions that hired, protected and ignored the stories for decades.

This means Indigenous-led health supports, particularly for abuse survivors and their families. It means language revitalization programs. It means restoring and recognizing Indigenous governments on their own terms.

And not doubting survivors when they share their stories.

It shouldn’t take millions of dollars and hours of work to legitimize dozens of similar accounts, but apparently it does if you’re Indigenous.

Let’s change that.

Complete Article HERE!

Patriarchy and purity culture combine to silence women in the Southern Baptist Convention

— And are blocking efforts to address the sexual abuse scandal

A woman describes being abused sexually by a Southern Baptist minister, outside the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in June 2019, in Birmingham, Ala.

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A devastating yearlong investigation into the executive committee of the largest conservative evangelical denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, has documented widespread claims of sex abuse including accusations of rape, cover-ups and gross mistreatment of women seeking justice.

In 2019 the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News partnered on a series of investigative reports on sexual misconduct by Southern Baptists with formal church roles. Subsequently, the annual meeting of the SBC held in June 2021 voted to authorize an investigations firm, Guidepost Solutions, to conduct an independent probe of its executive committee and its handling of sex abuse. The report and the list of alleged offenders has recently been made public.

I am a scholar of evangelicalism, gender and American culture, and over several years of my research I have seen how deeply ingrained aspects of conservative white evangelicalism force women to stay silent. In researching my two books, “Evangelical Christian Women” and “Building God’s Kingdom,” I found how structures of patriarchy force women to stay silent.

These deeply ingrained aspects of conservative white evangelicalism include “complementarianism,” or the patriarchal view that God gives authority to men and requires submission from women, and purity culture, an extreme version of sexual abstinence.

Purity culture

The SBC’s “True Love Waits,” a premarital abstinence campaign for teens launched in 1992, was an important component of the rise of purity culture. It was best known for the purity rings that girls wore as part of a pledge to their virginity to God and family.

More than merely the value of forgoing sex until marriage, purity culture centers sexual purity as a primary measure of the value of young women, who need to remain “pure” to attract a godly man in marriage. Sex education is virtually nonexistent, and dating is traded for “courtship” leading to marriage, under the authority of the girl’s father.

As author Linda Kay Klein writes in her book “Pure,” women are taught that they are responsible not only for their own purity, but for the purity of the males around them. Women are also made to believe that they are responsible if men are led to sin by what women wear. Additionally, they can be blamed for being inadequately submissive and for speaking up when they should be quiet. Women raised with these teachings also report experiencing tremendous fear and shame around issues of gender, sex and marriage.

The rhetoric of purity culture can be traced directly to the racist origins of the Southern Baptist Convention. The defense of slavery was the very foundation upon which the denomination was built, and the protection of the “purity of white womanhood” was a the justification for the perpetuation of white supremacy that outlived slavery.

How survivors described the abuse

Credibly accused men were protected by the SBC, while the women who dared to speak up were called sluts, adulteresses, Jezebels and even agents of Satan. For example, the report details the story of one woman whose abuse was mischaracterized by the SBC’s Baptist Press as a consensual affair and she was harassed online and called an adulteress. She ultimately lost her job at a Southern Baptist organization.

The report, which the former SBC leader Russell Moore calls “apocalyptic,” details harassment, insults and attacks on social media, some of which came from Baptist leaders to whom the women had been taught God required them to revere and submit. For example, the executive staff member at the center of handling abuse accusations, Augie Boto, characterized the survivors seeking justice as doing the work of Satan.

Survivor after survivor described their treatment at the hands of their own leaders as worse than their initial assaults. One survivor told investigators that when she provided details of her sexual abuse as a child among other things, one Executive Committee (EC) member “turn(ed) his back to her while she was speaking … and another EC member chortl(ed).”

“I ask you to try to imagine what it’s like to speak about something so painful to a room in which men disrespect you in such a way. … to speak about this horrific trauma of having my pastor repeatedly rape me as a child, only to have religious leaders behave in this way,” she said.

Shaming and silencing women

A woman wearing a blue shirt speaking at a microphone, with a poster by her side that says 'I can call it evil because I know what goodness is.'
Rape survivor and abuse victim advocate Mary DeMuth speaks during a rally protesting the Southern Baptist Convention’s treatment of women outside the convention’s annual meeting in Dallas in June 2019.

When victims are permitted to tell their stories to people in authority, it is likely to be an all-male committee including perhaps friends of the accused.

In such a hearing women – who because of purity culture practices have often been taught to always be modest and quiet in mixed company and may have had little to no sex education – are asked to detail what they often say is the most painful experience of their lives. Purity culture creates in women a strong sense of shame surrounding their bodies, their own sexuality, and sex in general. When they exhibit evidence of that shame it is taken as an admission that they share responsibility for the abuse.

Like their forebears before them who mobilized the mythic purity of white womanhood to shore up their power, today’s leaders at the center of this report remain male and overwhelmingly white. They use the language of purity culture to shame and silence women seeking justice while, at the same time, leading the charge in the fight against coming to terms with racism.

Can there be real reform?

The chairman of the SBC executive committee, Rolland Slade, and interim President and CEO Willie McLaurin said in a statement, in response to the report: “We are grieved by the findings of this investigation. We are committed to doing all we can to prevent future instances of sexual abuse in churches, to improve our response and our care, to remove reporting roadblocks.” Other Baptists too have expressed shock and anger at the revelations.

The Guidepost Solutions report concludes with a series of strategies such as forming an independent committee to oversee reforms, including providing resources for prevention and reporting of abuse. As helpful as these strategies may be, they don’t address how the underlying culture of the SBC continues to maintain the structures of white patriarchy.

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