FILE – A woman prays at the San Ramon Nonato church after an Easter Holy Week procession was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak in Madrid, Spain, Thursday, April 9, 2020. Spain has approved a plan aimed at making reparation and economic compensation for victims of sex abuses committed by people connected to the Catholic Church.
Spain on Tuesday approved a plan aimed at making reparation and economic compensation for victims of sex abuse committed by people connected to the Catholic Church.
It also announced the future celebration of a public act of recognition for those affected and their families.
The Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, said the plan was based on recommendations in a report by Spain’s Ombudsman last year. From that report, he said it was concluded that some 440,000 adults may have suffered sex abuse in Spain by people linked to the church and that roughly half of those cases were committed by clergy.
Bolaños said the compensation would be financed by the church.
But in a statement Tuesday, Spain’s Bishops Conference rejected the plan, saying it discriminated against victims outside of church circles.
No details of how much or when financial compensation would be paid were released. Neither was a date set for any public act of recognition.
Bolaños said the plan aimed to “settle a debt with those victims who for decades were forgotten by everyone and now our democracy aims to repair” that, and make it a central part of government policy.
After years of virtually ignoring the issue, Spain’s bishops apologized for the abuses committed by church members following the Ombudsman’s report but disputed the number of victims involving the church as exaggerated. That report accused the church of widespread negligence.
Bolaños said the government hoped to carry out the plan over the next four years in collaboration with the church.
The project will include free legal assistance for all victims of sexual abuse and it will reinforce the prevention supervision in schools.
— Months later, former Knoxville Bishop Richard Stika is threatening priests
Bishop Richard F. Stika waves to the congregation during his during his episcopal ordination March 19 at the Knoxville, Tenn., convention center. Bishop Stika, a St. Louis native, is the third bishop to lead the Diocese of Knoxville, which was founded in 1988 and is home to almost 60,000 Catholics.. At left is principal consecrator Cardinal Justin F. Rigali of Philadelphia.
Though he hasn’t been employed by the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville for nearly a year, former Bishop Richard Stika continues to make his presence felt, contacting whistleblowers directly with threats of a lawsuit, including one who is a key witness in the sexual assault lawsuit against the church.
That lawsuit was filed by a former diocesan employee who alleges a former diocesan seminarian raped him and details how the diocese, led by Stika, interfered with the investigation and worked to discredit him. Knox News independently verified the interference, which led to the firing of an independent investigator.
As complaints about Stika’s leadership and handling of allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct piled up in the diocese, the bishop offered his resignation and it was accepted by Pope Francis in June 2023.
But Stika has continued to try to assert control over some of the priests in the Knoxville diocese. He sent a text message recently, for instance, to three priests, including the Rev. Brent Shelton, who left Knoxville in April 2023 after he was told he was being reassigned, a move church watchdogs viewed as retaliation.
Shelton recently filed a formal complaint against the diocese’s attorney with the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility, which polices attorney conduct.
Know News is not naming the other recipients of Stika’s message because they are constrained by church authorities from talking to the media and were unwilling to discuss the message.
“Happy Spy Wednesday,” reads the opening of the text.
“And it all started with (name of priest Knox News is not identifying)! I will never understand how anyone could be so hateful to destroy the ministry of any cleric and in (name of priest Knox News is not identifying)’s case to bring a former seminarian to the point of suicide. It is all documented, my attorneys are ready and the information will be shared with my successor.”
Shelton said Stika’s messages are both threatening and intimidating.
“If bishops keep getting away with threatening and retaliating against whistleblowers, I’m afraid children and vulnerable adults will never be safe in the Church,” he told Knox News in an email. “The diocese needs to move forward, but we cannot do that if priests must live under the shadow of threats like these from the man we looked up to as our spiritual father for over a decade.”
Stika responded to questions from Knox News by text message and denied his messages to priests were threatening.
“Did not threaten at all. Just informed them about a possible lawsuit but I have decided not to include them in a lawsuit,” he said. “I have developed some additional heart issues over the last months and decided it is not worth it. I have moved on. I am retired. Plus, I have not found you to present anything that is balanced.”
The most recent messages were sent March 27, and Knox News viewed them. Shelton sent a list of questions to the diocese about the messages April 1 and 10 days later he received a “good faith” response acknowledging the questions from Louisville Archbishop Shelton Fabre, who is acting as the apostolic administrator until a new bishop is named.
The perception of some priests that Stika is threatening them is similar behavior they and others flagged during his years in Knoxville.
In a 2023 court filing, for example, Stika admitted he told a room full of priests that the man who says he was raped by the former seminarian was actually the predator, not the other way around. He also admitted to telling a separate group of priests that the man groomed the seminarian accused of rape.
“I’m sad but not surprised,” David Clohessy, former national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote in an email. “This sometimes happens when church officials let a bad bishop quietly slink away without disciplining or defrocking him.”
Is it Witness intimidation?
Mitchell Garabedian, a world-renowned clergy sex abuse attorney whose work helped break open the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in Boston in the early 2000s, told Knox News Stika is potentially tampering with witnesses in the lawsuit that names him among the defendants.
“The question is (was) he intimidating the witness,” Garabedian said. “If he is intimidating the witness, then the judge in the case will look at what was said and whether the witness was intimated and decide what sanctions should be brought against Stika.
“Witness intimidation can turn into a criminal matter if it is found the witness is being intimidated and being influenced by a person.”
He went on to say Stika’s messages are unusual but not unprecedented. Typically, those types of messages are kept within secret church files.
“It sounds like bishop Stika is still a powerful person within the church who might be trying to influence the outcome of the case,” he said.
Attorney Patrick Thronson, who represents the man who filed the lawsuit that names Stika, declined to comment about whether he thought the former bishop is tampering with witnesses, but he did say he plans to take up Stika’s messages with the court.
In part, it was his position — as a priest and doctoral student — that convinced so many children and parents at Seattle’s St. Paul School and Catholic parish to trust Patrick O’Donnell.
He told them he was working on his graduate research when he recruited 60 seventh- and eighth-graders for a 1978 dissertation experiment “on the subject of trust.” And he told them he was working on “research” when he asked parents and teachers to pull students out of class.
In fact, the reason he was in Seattle in the first place was because the Spokane Diocese had sent him to get treatment for what one priest euphemistically called his “pediatrician complex.”
In the 1970s and early ’80s, as he was moved from parish to parish — in Spokane, Seattle, and the small eastern Washington town of Rosalia — he allegedly molested more than 65 children, court records show. He admitted abusing at least 30. Six victims were from St. Paul.
By 2002, O’Donnell had become known as one of the most infamous predator priests in the region. His actions helped drive the Spokane Diocese into bankruptcy. He was sued — settling for $5 million he didn’t have. He lost his psychology license, his role as a priest and his reputation.
But O’Donnell still has one honor left.
“He can put the letters Ph.D after his name, and that’s still a problem,” said Pomona College chemistry professor Dan O’Leary. “He’s in my world, higher education. I don’t think he deserves to be in this world.”
Back when O’Leary was an altar boy in Seattle, he had his own run-in with O’Donnell. Since 2018, O’Leary has been doggedly urging the University of Washington to take a radical step: revoking O’Donnell’s 1978 degree entirely.
Emails provided to InvestigateWest show that UW has seriously considered taking that step over the past six years. Numerous administrators, university investigators, the Title IX office and even the state attorney general’s office have weighed in. The university declined to make any staffers available for an interview with InvestigateWest, and InvestigateWest was unable to reach O’Donnell, now 81, for comment.
In a statement, however, the university said that while the actions were “heinous and reprehensible” and the efforts to seek justice “certainly understandable,” they were “unable to obtain evidence that in the course of his graduate work, Mr. O’Donnell met the standard for degree revocation.”
InvestigateWest, however, has uncovered additional evidence tying O’Donnell’s sexual abuse to his graduate work and calling the honesty of the work itself into question.
In a 2009 lawsuit against the Seattle Archdiocese, an attorney demonstrates how the Spokane Diocese transferred child molester Patrick O’Donnell to the Seattle region, where O’Donnell attended graduate school.
Degrees have been revoked before, but mostly for issues like plagiarism and data falsification. Revoking a degree for sexual assault would mean diving into a thorny issue that has divided academics for decades: Can you separate the research from the researcher?
Former American Psychiatric Association President Paul Appelbaum, an expert on ethics in medicine and psychiatry, said even the question of whether to use data from the experiments conducted in Nazi death camps doesn’t have a clear consensus among researchers. He’s uneasy about the idea of revoking O’Donnell’s degree, instead of just condemning his actions.
“Going back to erase the record of his Ph.D seems to raise more problems than it could conceivably address,” Appelbaum said.
Yet Mary Dispenza, part of the Seattle Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that even decades later, it “matters to a survivor” when an “institution finally stands up to crimes of any nature.”
“If the university has the right to do that, I say do it,” Dispenza said. “If it is a wrong act, you make it right. It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 years later.”
FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE
O’Leary wasn’t one of O’Donnell’s victims. But he thinks he almost was. O’Leary said he remembers lying on his back, in the winter of his eighth-grade year, at a university pool after O’Donnell offered to teach him how to swim. He will never forget the look on O’Donnell’s face as he floated in his arms.
“It was really clear to me that he was fantasizing,” O’Leary said.
The priest wanted to shower afterward, O’Leary recalls, but the altar boy declined to join him. These memories are nearly a half-century old, but he still finds them “chilling to the bone.”
“It’s like being in a car with Ted Bundy,” O’Leary said.
But he also knows that lawsuits are filled with depositions of boys who said they’d experienced far worse. There were boys who knew O’Donnell as a basketball coach, or track coach, or Boy Scout chaplain, or a family friend. There were boys he’d strip naked after basketball practice, boys he’d take out on his boat, boys he’d wrestle, grope, tell to keep quiet.
There was the boy O’Donnell would let drive if he’d sit on his lap. The boy who rolled the lowest number in a dice game in O’Donnell’s hot tub and had to run naked to the dock to do push-ups. And the boy who knew something was wrong one night at Spokane’s Bishop White Seminary, who tried to call his mom again and again but kept getting a busy signal until O’Donnell was on top of him, mauling him, kissing him, grinding against him, until the boy pleaded with him enough times to stop.
There were boys who grew up and confronted O’Donnell. In the courtroom. In the press. At the front door of the parish with a Bible in their shaking hands. In a suicide note.
The fact that O’Leary got away unharmed, while so many of O’Donnell’s victims didn’t, has stuck with him.
“I think there’s probably some survivor’s guilt,” O’Leary said. “You lived and other people perished.”
It’s part of what’s fueling his tenacity, driving him to keep hammering away on this issue for so many years. Whenever one UW administrator stopped responding to his emails, he’d simply reach out to another.
When he managed to get his hands on O’Donnell’s 1978 doctoral dissertation — sent to him in California by interlibrary loan — the thing that angered him the most was on the very last page: The University of Washington consent form, a permission slip to participate in the experiment that students and parents were asked to sign.
“That told me that O’Donnell understood that researching with human subjects has responsibility,” O’Leary said. “It’s clear that he was well-aware there are ethical obligations.”
The May 1978 experiment had focused on studying how trust develops between kids and adults. The recruits were asked about the prisoner’s dilemma, a famous two-person negotiation game: If both players are trustworthy and choose to cooperate, they both benefit — gaining a small amount of money. But if one decides to betray the other, the betrayer gets more money and the victim gets nothing.
Attorney Michael Pfau, who represented many of O’Donnell’s victims, said he’s never come across any victims who remember being a part of the experiment. But he cited O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation, “Evoking Trustworthy Behavior of Children and Adults in A Prisoner’s Dilemma Game,” in multiple lawsuits as an example “of a pedophile using a number of means to gain access to children.”
To O’Leary, the topic was “tragically ironic.” In March 2018, as the #MeToo movement sparked hundreds of whistleblowers across the country to go public with allegations against rapists, O’Leary made his pitch in an email to the UW: If O’Donnell had “engaged in sexually abusive behavior under the pretext of conducting doctoral research” then surely, UW would “disavow itself from that research and question the validity of any degrees given in association” with it.
He knew it was going to be an uphill battle. While plenty of honorary degrees of serial predators such as Bill Cosby have been retracted, pulling a real degree for nonacademic reasons is very rare.
Dan O’Leary, chemistry professor at Pomona College in California, says that the University of Washington awarding a doctoral degree to Patrick O’Donnell, who preyed upon children while a grad student at the university, “is a history that needs to be corrected.”
There have been exceptions. In 1999, MIT revoked the diploma of a former fraternity pledge trainer for providing a freshman with the alcohol that killed him. In 2000, a federal court found that University of Virginia did have the right to revoke a graduate’s degree for embezzling funds from a student club, but allowed the student to sue on due process grounds. And while Columbia University officials revoked the degree of a journalism student accused of sexual assault in 2017, they restored it three years later as part of a lawsuit settlement. But almost all of these cases involved recent graduates.
But Applebaum, the ethics expert, said he’s uneasy about the notion of stripping away someone’s degree for anything but academic reasons.
“Whenever someone is convicted of a felony, does that mean we go back and take away their graduate degrees or their undergraduate degrees or their high school diplomas?” he asked. “Where does this end?”
But when O’Leary reached out to UW in 2018, they were coming off of multiple years of headlines about a star university researcher accused repeatedly of sexual harassment.
In emails provided to InvestigateWest, university officials initially seemed supportive of revoking O’Donnell’s degree. Martin Howell, the assistant dean for academic and student affairs in the College of Education at UW, told O’Leary that the “mission and values” of the university were driving him and other administrators to push O’Leary’s proposal forward.
Since the 1950s, UW faculty had the power to recommend that the Board of Regents revoke a degree retroactively — if they could prove it was granted based on “fraud and deceit.”
The fundamental question, Howell wrote in a 2019 email, was whether, if the school knew about O’Donnell’s conduct at the time, they would have refused to grant him the doctorate. At first, Howell said, they anticipated being able to rely on “non-academic misconduct that would have violated the UW Student Conduct Code in place at that time.”
But after a conversation with the state attorney general’s office, the university concluded it would be more difficult than they had suspected: To take away his degree they needed proof of fraud and deceit connected to his actual academic work.
The best evidence for that had come from Jim Biteman, one of O’Donnell’s victims at St. Paul. Biteman was never a part of O’Donnell’s 1978 “Prisoner’s Dilemma” experiment. But the year before, he recounted in a deposition, O’Donnell repeatedly pulled him out of class, claiming “he was going to ask me questions regarding research for his university studies.”
The priest would ask the boy to stand in front of the cafeteria window — his back to O’Donnell — and imagine himself naked and describe what he saw. And then O’Donnell would ask Biteman to imagine another boy naked with him, touching him, and ask how the thought made the eighth-grader feel.
“He would always say, ‘Don’t tell anybody about this conversation. This is part of my research. I don’t want you to spoil it, because I have to talk to some other boys,’” Biteman said in the deposition. “I know for a fact that he pulled other boys down there and did the same routine, same questions because I have spoken with others that have gone through it.”
Later, O’Donnell invited Biteman on trips on his boat up at a lake — as he did with so many other kids — and molested him.
While Biteman did not respond to an interview request from InvestigateWest, in a 2019 email he stressed to O’Leary that the evidence clearly showed O’Donnell had used his role as a graduate student to abuse underage boys.
“If the UW chooses to ignore the facts and requires ‘proof’ that directly ties his research to the abuse,” Biteman wrote, “then it appears they are not interested in pursuing what is right and are taking the easy way out.”
He hoped O’Leary could get traction on his efforts to convince UW to revoke O’Donnell’s degree.
“Anything that can be done to discredit this guy, who is currently living out his life … with little if any payment or accountability for his crimes, is welcome,” Biteman wrote.
AN ACADEMIC QUESTION
Finally, last June — more than five years after O’Leary first raised the issue with the university — he was told the investigation had come to a halt.
The trouble with Biteman’s account, the university explained in a letter to O’Leary, was that they didn’t have any evidence O’Donnell was actually conducting doctoral research when he was victimizing the eighth-grade boy.
If O’Donnell was lying to Biteman, if his “research” didn’t have anything to do with his studies and he was just molesting them, then his degree was safe.
On its face, that may seem perverse. But Appelbaum, the ethics expert, argues that it makes sense. A university degree shouldn’t be read as a moral badge of character, he said; it’s proof of the completion of academic standards.
“If a man, however evil he was a person and however many people he may have harmed, fulfilled the requirements for a Ph.D, then he’s got a Ph.D,” Appelbaum said.
In UW’s emails to O’Leary, officials stressed they’d tried to find a clear connection to his dissertation.
While O’Donnell had written that 60 seventh- and eighth-graders had participated in the experiment at St. Paul, there was no record of who they were. The university tried to reach out to Biteman, but never heard back. The university even sent a letter to O’Donnell himself, to his home in Mount Vernon, but through an attorney, O’Donnell declined to talk.
But UW would not tell InvestigateWest whether they considered another major trove of information: court records.
During a 2004 deposition, O’Donnell testified that he did pull kids like Biteman out of class for purposes tied to UW academics — but didn’t indicate it had anything to do directly with his dissertation. Instead, he said, he was performing a “psychological test” on them.
His academic transcripts, indeed, show he was taking a class called “individual testing,” which focused on intelligence tests for children. But O’Donnell said the tests he was conducting involved a word-association game where the kids would have to react to words like “man,” “masturbation” and “intercourse,” though he claimed he didn’t particularly emphasize the sexually charged words over other words.
O’Leary sees it as evidence of “extensive human subjects violation during the courses” that O’Donnell had taken. Combined with Biteman’s testimony, it suggested that O’Donnell had been using these kinds of games to groom young boys and that this behavior was clearly intertwined with his academic work.
“When someone is a rule breaker, it’s worth going back and taking a close look at their doctoral research, and see whether there’s any rule-breaking there, too,” Appelbaum said.
Indeed, O’Donnell insisted that the only reason that he had landed on the “prisoner’s dilemma” dissertation topic was because “the ethics committee at the university wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do” and he’d done similar research for his master’s program at Gonzaga University.
Vast sections of O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation had lifted entire pages from his master’s thesis word for word, right down to using the same lengthy quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” about how the “difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”
Today, the UW warns doctoral students that plagiarism, even using “your own, previously published work” without citing it, could prevent them from getting a degree.
The prohibition against self-plagiarism can be hazy, Appelbaum said, but it becomes a problem “when it crosses the line from merely recapitulating the same idea or using the same phrase to extracting and reusing a larger body of words.”
Self-plagiarism, of course, is almost a comically minor sin compared to those committed against the more than 30 victims O’Donnell has confessed to molesting. But, crucially, it’s an academic one.
The revelation has re-invigorated O’Leary. Earlier this month, he was armed with a highlighter and a green pen, going line by line through a copy of O’Donnell’s dissertation, marking up just how many lines appeared verbatim in each of them. He even identified two small instances of plagiarizing other people’s work — nearly word-for-word quotes that were sourced in the Gonzaga thesis but unsourced in his dissertation.
“I’m confident it would raise eyebrows,” O’Leary said. “Anyone on a dissertation committee, if they knew that was happening, they would consider it fraud or deceit.”
Presented with this evidence by InvestigateWest, the UW said it remains open to new information but was “focused on the concerns regarding abuse of minors within the conduct of his university research, not plagiarism.” It declined to comment further.
But O’Leary sees an opportunity: O’Donnell had used the pretext of UW doctoral research to molest children as a grad student. Now, O’Leary argued, the university could use the shoddiness of his actual research as a pretext for removing the degree of a child molester.
“It does directly meet the usual standard for degree revocation,” O’Leary said. “Maybe the university is actually secretly hoping for a valid reason to do the right thing.”
— An independent monitor will oversee the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s handling of sexual abuse allegations under a settlement between the diocese and New York Attorney General Letitia James
By Associated Press
An independent monitor will oversee the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s handling of sexual abuse allegations under a settlement between the diocese and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The agreement announced Tuesday will address “years of mismanaging clergy sexual abuse cases,” James said.
Investigators with the attorney general’s office found that officials with the diocese failed to comply with their own sex abuse policies put in place after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002.
In one case, the attorney general said, a priest who admitted that he had repeatedly sexually abused minors was defrocked in 2007 but requested confidentiality. The diocese kept the abuse secret until 2017 when it announced for the first time that this priest had been credibly accused of and admitted to abusing children. The priest worked as a professor at two universities in the intervening decade.
Another priest was transferred from parish to parish after diocesan officials learned of problems with his conduct in the 1990s, James said. A nun who was the principal of a school in the diocese quit her job in 2000 because she had witnessed the priest behaving inappropriately with young boys, but the diocese only issued a warning. The priest was not removed from duty or barred from interacting with minors until 2018, James said.
As part of the settlement, the diocese has agreed to strengthen its procedures for handling allegations of clergy sexual abuse and misconduct, including publicly posting an explanation of the complaint and investigation process.
An independent, secular monitor who will oversee the diocese’s compliance with the enhanced policies and procedures and will issue an annual report on the diocese’s handling of sexual abuse cases.
Officials with the diocese, which includes the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, said they have cooperated with investigators and have worked to prevent future instances of abuse by clergy.
Brooklyn Bishop Robert Brennan, who has led the diocese since 2021, said in a statement, “While the Church should have been a sanctuary, I am deeply sorry that it was a place of trauma for the victims of clergy sexual abuse. I pray God’s healing power will sustain them.”
The attorney general’s office began investigating eight of New York’s Catholic dioceses in September 2018. A settlement with the Diocese of Buffalo was announced in October 2022. Investigations into the other dioceses, including those in Rochester, Albany and Syracuse, are ongoing, James said.
— “Joannès Rivoire left a legacy of intimidation, fear and horror to his victims. His victims will now begin healing from his death,” Inuk elder says.
MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq holds a photo of Joannès Rivoire during a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Thursday, July 8, 2021. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate says Rivoire, a priest accused of sexually abusing Inuit children in Nunavut, has died after a long illness.
By Brittany Hobson
A priest accused of sexually abusing Inuit children in Nunavut decades ago has died in France after a long, undisclosed illness.
The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, including the Oblates of Lacombe Canada and the Oblate Province of France, say Joannès Rivoire died Thursday. He was in his 90s.
Rev. Ken Thorson with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Lacombe Canada says the death may be difficult news for those who advocated for the priest to face justice in Canada.
“We sincerely regret that … Rivoire never made himself available and will never face the charges that were laid against him. We further regret that efforts for him to be formally removed as a priest were unsuccessful,” he said in an emailFriday.
A recent independent review of the claims against Rivoire supported allegations that the priest assaulted six children in Nunavut.
Rivoire arrived in Canada in 1959. He stayed in the North until January 1993, when he told superiors he needed to return to France to take care of his elderly parents.
That same month, four people went to the RCMP in Nunavut to accuse Rivoire of sexual assaults.
Rivoire refused to return to Canada after an arrest warrant was issued in 1998. He faced at least three charges of sexual abuse in the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Rankin Inlet and Naujaat. More than two decades later, the charges were stayed.
Another arrest warrant was issued for Rivoire in 2022 for a charge of indecent assault involving a girl in Arviat and Whale Cove between 1974 and 1979. French authorities refused an extradition request.
Rivoire denied all allegations against him and none were proven in court.
Inuit leaders and politicians, from senators to Nunavut premiers, spent years urging that the priest should face trial, with some taking their fight to Parliament Hill and Lyon, France, where Rivoire lived.
Piita Irniq, an Inuk elder and former politician who fought for more than a decade to have Rivoire returned to Canada, said in a message to The Canadian Press that he was notified Friday morning of Rivoire’s death.
“Rivoire left a legacy of intimidation, fear and horror to his victims. His victims will now begin healing from his death.”
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a national organization representing Inuit across Canada, called the case a systemic failure of nation states and religious institutions.
Natan Obed, the organization’s president, met with Pope Francis in 2022 and asked him to intervene in the case.
The group said in a statement that Inuit have done everything to help bring justice, but in the end it was not enough.
“Our thoughts are with the many victims … and the many victims of abusers who continue to elude justice,” it said.
Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., a group that represents Nunavut Inuit, said in a statement it’s disappointing Rivoire didn’t have to answer to the charges against him.
“NTI assisted in the efforts of victims and their families seeking justice and will continue to stand with them now that Rivoire has died,” it said.
“Governments must do better to support victims of abuse and in bringing perpetrators of violence against children to justice.”
Rivoire was banned from public ministry after the Oblates said they first learned of criminal proceedings against him. The Oblates in both Canada and France repeatedly urged Rivoire to face the charges, but he refused.
Some believed the Oblates played a role in his departure for France. The independent review, led by retired Superior Court justice Andre Denis, found no evidence the church was aware of any allegations or helped the priest leave.
Denis said it’s possible rumours about the priest’s behaviour are why he left, but there was no evidence.
The Oblates in Canada and France also appealed to leadership in Rome to commence dismissal proceedings against Rivoire. Earlier this year, it was determined the priest could remain a member of the congregation.
Thorson said Friday the Oblates will continue to offer support for complainants and their families in the next chapter of their healing process.
“We wish to apologize unequivocally to anyone who was harmed by Rivoire … our prayers are with the Inuit community and anyone who is still processing this news.”
