Retired Quebec judge says he believes sexual abuse allegations against former Nunavut priest

— Canadian Oblates commissioned Andre Denis to investigate handling of allegations against Johannes Rivoire

Former Quebec Superior Court justice André Denis leads the Oblate Safeguarding Commission, an independent review of historical allegations of sexual abuse against Johannes Rivoire in present-day Nunavut.

By Emma Tranter, Tessa Vikander

A retired Quebec Superior Court judge, in a report commissioned by the Canadian Oblates, says he believes allegations made against former Nunavut priest Johannes Rivoire of sexually abusing children in the territory are true.

The report, written by Andre Denis, also suggests the Catholic church was not aware of the allegations made against Rivoire at the time because the RCMP didn’t notify them.

“Rivoire did not tell the whole truth to his superiors, to his confrères, to the Inuit for whom he had pastoral responsibility, and he himself denies a reality that has nevertheless been demonstrated,” Denis wrote in a 57-page report released Tuesday.

Denis’s report is not a legal finding of guilt. His investigation makes conclusions based on a “preponderance of evidence,” and not “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Rivoire, an Oblate priest from France, has long faced allegations he sexually abused children in Nunavut in the 1960s and 1970s. He spent more than 30 years working as a priest in the territory, mostly in Arviat and Naujaat.

Rivoire, who is 92 and lives in Lyon, France, and his lawyer have denied all of the allegations against him. CBC has reached out to Rivoire’s lawyer about the report, but has not received a response.

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, OMI Lacombe Canada and the Oblates of the Province of France hired Denis to investigate how past allegations against Rivoire were addressed within the congregation.

“The scandal for the plaintiffs is that Joannès Rivoire remains a religious despite all he has done. This is a reality the victims do not accept,” Denis wrote.

Tall man in black frock, in black and white.
Rev. Johannes Rivoire moved to Nunavut in the 1960s and stayed there until returning to France in 1993.

6 years before charges were laid

Denis travelled to France, Italy and Canada, including Nunavut, where he interviewed some of Rivoire’s alleged victims.

He also met at length with Rivoire, who denied the allegations but claimed he had a consenting sexual relationship with a woman in the territory.

Denis also concluded the Catholic church didn’t try to help him escape the Canadian justice system.

Three charges of sexual abuse were laid against Rivoire in 1998. They were stayed in 2017 after the Crown decided there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

A new charge was brought forward in 2022 and an arrest warrant was issued for Rivoire.

Days before the first complaint was filed with the RCMP in 1993, Rivoire fled Canada for France.

Denis says Rivoire told the church he needed to return home to take care of his elderly parents.

The RCMP finally charged Rivoire in 1998.

“The RCMP had no communication with the Oblates, nor did they notify them of anything throughout the legal process,” Denis wrote.

“Had these complaints been brought before the court in 1993, it is possible to believe that Joannès Rivoire would have returned to Nunavut to face Canadian justice. He probably could have been persuaded to do so.”

Denis says the Oblates were not informed of Rivoire’s charges until more than a decade later.

Five seated people look at the camera.
Delegates with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. speaking to media in Paris, France, in an effort to push the French government to extradite Johannes Rivoire in 2022.

Inuit survivors began speaking publicly about what they went through. A delegation also travelled to France in 2022, and asked that Rivoire return to Canada and face trial, and advocates for survivors of child sexual abuse in France also campaigned on the issue. The Oblates in both countries supported the request.

Although the priest has faced several criminal charges from the Canadian courts, France does not typically extradite people, and in October 2022, the country denied the latest request for Rivoire’s extradition.

Last month, leadership in Rome ruled against Rivoire’s dismissal from the Oblates.

‘I was angry’

Tanya Tungilik, whose late father Marius Tungilik had accused Rivoire of sexual abuse, said she had mixed feelings after reading the report.

“I was angry at a lot of parts but glad that [Denis] said that Rivoire was guilty of the crimes … that he believed us,” she said on Tuesday.

A woman wearing a blue traditional Inuit amauti
Tanya Tungilik, pictured in Rankin Inlet in 2022. Tungilik, whose late father Marius Tungilik had accused Rivoire of sexual abuse, said she believes RCMP also need to be held accountable for why Rivoire was not charged until 1998.

Tungilik said she was troubled by how long it took for the RCMP to investigate the allegations brought against Rivoire.

“Why did it take so long?” she said. “They need to be held accountable, too.”

She also said she doesn’t believe Denis’s claim that the Oblates didn’t know about the allegations made against Rivoire.

“I’m glad that it’s out there,” Tungilik said. “But I’m disappointed and angry that he says that the Oblates didn’t know at all.”

Facts hidden

Denis met with Rivoire in Lyon, France, in the spring of 2023, but explains in the report that he doesn’t believe “the version of events” that Rivoire told him.

Instead, Rivoire left Canada “hiding this terrible reality” from church authorities. He told a “true but incomplete story” that he was only returning to France to care for his sick parents.

Reflecting on meeting the Inuit delegates in 2022, Denis said Rivoire told him he thought those who were accusing him “may be trying to get money out of the Oblates.”

Denis’ research of historical documents found Rivoire “did not tell the whole truth to his superiors.”

His report quotes a 2013 conversation between Rivoire and Father Yves Chalvet de Récy, when Chalvet had just learned of the arrest warrant for Rivoire.

At that point, Rivoire is said to have told Chalvet the children he was accused of abusing “were looking for tenderness that they didn’t have in their families.”

“If I’m not innocent, the children aren’t either,” Rivoire told Chalvet.

“It’s true that I’m not innocent, but allegations of sexual assaults on minors are a fabrication. That’s why I came back to France in the first place.”

Ken Thorson, provincial lead of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Lacombe, poses for a photo.
Ken Thorson, provincial lead of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Lacombe, says he accept the report’s findings.

Rev. Ken Thorson, with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Lacombe Canada, said they accept the report’s findings “with a heavy heart.”

“We wish to apologize unequivocally to anyone who was harmed by an Oblate priest and to continue taking concrete steps towards transparency and transformation, informed by guidance from victims, survivors and Inuit representatives.”

Complete Article HERE!

Cardinal found guilty of embezzlement in Vatican ‘trial of the century’

Italian Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu attends a Vatican consistory for the creation of new Cardinals on Aug. 27, 2022 at St. Peter’s Basilica.

By and 

Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope.

Then his career collided with church prosecutors, who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption, setting up the Vatican’s trial of the century.

On Saturday, Becciu — the first cardinal tried by the Vatican’s little-known criminal court — was found guilty of several counts of embezzlement after a trial of marred by allegations of witness tampering and papal interference. Becciu was sentenced to five years and six months in a verdict read out in a converted quarter of the museum that houses the Sistine Chapel.

Becciu’s lawyers said the decision would be appealed, but it put the cardinal closer to one of Vatican City’s handful of jail cells — a result that amounts to both a sign of accountability and embarrassment for an institution that has long struggled to root out corruption. He was also barred from holding any Vatican office.

The case, a marathon of 86 courtroom hearings that mixed a hodgepodge of various charges, further exposed the murky world of Vatican finances, as well as the pope’s crusade for accountability, even, critics argued, at the cost of the rule of law. The star defendant was always Becciu, once a papal confident who renounced his senior post after a surprise 2020 meeting in which Pope Francis dramatically confronted him with the accusations against him. Francis stripped him of his privileges as cardinal before any finding of guilt. Later, some of those rights were unofficially reinstated.

The Vatican, meanwhile, emerges worse for wear, with new questions raised about the effectiveness and fairness of its legal system. Portrayed as an exercise in transparency under a crusading pope, the case nevertheless appeared to backfire in key ways, opening an unwanted window into the intrigue, infighting and ineptitude at heart of the world’s smallest sovereign state.

“The pope ended up kicking a hornets’ nest,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, a former editor of the Vatican newspaper.

A bad Vatican investment in a tony London property that ultimately led to massive losses prompted the sweeping investigation, including unprecedented raids of Vatican offices. As prosecutors dug, they claimed Becciu had wrongly funneled 125,000 euros to a Sardinian charity run by his brother and another 575,000 euros to Cecilia Marogna, a Sardinian woman with a humanitarian organization in Slovenia who, Becciu said, was supposed to help free a kidnapped nun. Other senior Vatican officials who signed off on the London deal were never indicted, and the pope had been previously apprised of the transaction.

Before the trial began, Francis appeared to use his powers in ways that supporters saw as a quest for transparency, but critics called overreach by a man who serves as Vatican City’s absolute monarch. He approved a series of secret edicts aimed at empowering prosecutors, including one allowing investigators to engage in wiretapping.

Pope Francis makes the sign of the cross during the weekly general audience at the Vatican on Wednesday.

As prosecutors sought to prove their case, they were plagued by setbacks, including questions about the credibility of their star witness and revelations that he had been coached by a Becciu enemy.

The trial came as a pope elected with a mandate to reform the Roman Curia — the opaque bureaucracy that runs Vatican City — was seen as having made strides, if still not enough, to improve financial transparency. The Vatican bank — long tainted by secretive accounting and money laundering scandals — underwent a cleanup during the past decade, a process begun under Pope Benedict XVI and accelerated under Francis.

Francis has also banned gifts to Vatican employees worth more than $50, and forced Holy See officials to sign a pledge that they have no assets in tax havens.

The Becciu case “says a lot about the pope’s will — theatrical and spectacular — to clean house,” said Emiliano Fittipaldi, an Italian journalist and noted Vatican watcher. He added, “Becciu became a sort of symbol, or a scapegoat, even if he didn’t commit any crime, of a system that had to be dealt with at last.”

Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi sought prison sentences between four and 13 years for the defendants, as well as nearly 500 million euros in restitution. Becciu maintained his “absolute innocence” and contended he did not steal “a single euro.” During the case, Becciu appeared to suggest the pope had turned on him even as he was forced to deny reports that he funded an international smear campaign against one of Francis’s fiercest conservative critics.

Some observers wondered why the Vatican sought to prosecute the complicated case that ran from Britain to Slovenia to Italy in the first place, rather than turn it over to better equipped Italian authorities.

After Francis became pope, Becciu, who formerly served as de facto chief of staff at the Vatican’s secretariat of state — its diplomatic arm — would frequently travel with him and was seen as one of the few men within the Holy See who could freely knock on the pope’s door.

During his time in that post, the secretariat invested in a luxury building on London’s fashionable Sloane Avenue through an Italian financier, Raffaele Mincione. The property had once served as warehouses for the Harrods department store. With upgrades, the Vatican was supposed to make a mint.

Instead, it turned out that the property had been radically overvalued. It was sold last year at a $175-million loss. But before that, attempts by the secretariat to refinance a loan through the Vatican bank set off alarm bells that got back to the pope and triggered the broader investigation.

A view, on Feb. 18, 2021, of 60 Sloane Avenue, a period building in West London owned by the Vatican.

On the stand, Becciu decried his transformation from pious cleric to “monster.” Behind the scenes, he set out to prove his innocence. In 2021, before the trial started, he wrote a series of letters to Francis, urging the pope to confirm he had knowledge of, and even supported, the London deal.

Becciu additionally asked Francis to admit he had prior knowledge of the agreement with Marogna, the woman with the charity in Slovenia who was paid an exorbitant fee for unclear services. Becciu has said he believed the money was going to assist the liberation of Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez, a Colombian nun kidnapped in 2017 in Mali.

In a subsequent call to Francis, made the day after the pope was released from a Rome hospital for colon surgery, Becciu secretly recorded the pontiff, who appeared sympathetic to his plight. But a follow-up letter to the pope requesting his written support against the charges resulted in a frosty letter in legalese, in which Francis expressed his “surprise” at Becciu’s request and said he could not help him.

The prosecutors’ case in part rested on the testimony of Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, the Vatican official who had signed contracts related to a London property in 2018. Initially a target of the investigation, he altered his testimony and became a witness for the prosecution against Becciu. Former Vatican diplomat Francesca Chaouqui — jailed for 10 months in connection to the Vatileaks scandal which was seen as helping to prompt Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation — later testified that she had sought to influence Perlasca after blaming Becciu for playing a role in her downfall.

Complete Article HERE!

Catholic dioceses are declaring bankruptcy.

— Abuse survivors say it’s a ‘way to silence’ them

The insolvency of California dioceses has caused some cases be put on hold, even as a $175m cathedral has risen over Oakland

By

In Oakland, California, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the Light is difficult to miss. Towering over Lake Merritt in the heart of the city, its modernist glass dome reflects the East Bay sun in all directions.

The building, which was completed in 2008 and financed by the Roman Catholic diocese of Oakland, cost $175m. But that price tag confounds Joseph Piscitelli.

In the 1970s, Piscitelli attended a Catholic high school in nearby Richmond, where, from the age of 14, he experienced repeated sexual abuse at the hands of his vice-principal, an ordained priest. For decades, Piscitelli experienced nightmares and panic attacks. Friends who had also been abused turned to drugs and alcohol, and several took their own lives.

In 2003, Piscitelli sued the Salesian College Preparatory high school and the Salesian order, and won. While the cases were decided in his favor in 2006, they had not held leaders at the top accountable. So, in 2020, he filed a new suit, this time against the Oakland diocese.

Then, to Piscitelli’s dismay, the diocese declared bankruptcy in May. As a result, his case was put on an indefinite hold.

The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California.

“Oakland could get together enough money to build a $200m cathedral not too long ago, but they can’t get the money together to pay the child victims whom they raped for decades,” Piscitelli said. “They’re morally and ethically bankrupt, but they’re not financially bankrupt.”


One by one, various arms of the Catholic church across California have declared bankruptcy, citing an inability to pay damages from large numbers of sexual abuse lawsuits. The dioceses of Santa Rosa and Oakland filed in the spring. The archdiocese of San Francisco followed suit in August, and the diocese of San Diego has shared its plan to do the same in November. The lawsuits come at a time when Catholicism in California is growing – fueled in large part by immigration from Latin America and Asia – while other parts of the US, including former Catholic hubs in the north-east, are seeing their numbers dwindle.

Church bankruptcy declarations are not unprecedented. From Portland to Milwaukee and from Helena to Rochester, dioceses have been declaring – and emerging from – chapter 11 bankruptcy for nearly two decades. And it isn’t only the Catholic church taking these steps. The Boy Scouts of America likewise sought protections amid thousands of sexual abuse allegations in 2020.

The flood of California suits came after 2019 legislation opened a three-year “look-back window” that would allow survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file suits based on old claims that would normally have fallen outside the statute of limitations. When the window closed last December, more than 2,000 individuals around the state had filed cases against the Catholic church; 330 accusers have sued the Oakland diocese alone.

“No one really expected this huge number [of abuse cases] to come in at this last month,” said Maureen Day, a sociologist and associate professor of religion and society at the Franciscan School of Theology. “It suddenly became a much larger financial hardship for many dioceses.”

But declaring chapter 11 does not mean that the church is broke, said Marie Reilly, professor of law at Penn State University. Rather, it is a legal strategy undertaken by corporations that say they don’t have the funds to pay a high number of individual settlements. Known as “reorganization”, these bankruptcy protections let the church avoid undertaking dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of individual costly trials by grouping them into one settlement.

“It will look like more of an administrative process,” said Reilly, who specializes in bankruptcy law and also created a database that tracks diocesan bankruptcies.

But the church claims bankruptcy is also fairer to victims, primarily because it means each victim is treated equally and all survivors receive even payouts.

“You see some of the settlements that are out there. You can almost use up all the funds on one or two settlements, and the rest of the survivors that have legitimate concerns get nothing,” said Peter Marlow, executive director of communications and media relations for the archdiocese of San Francisco. In 2019, the Los Angeles archdiocese paid $8m to a single abuse survivor. To date, settlements have cost California’s Catholic church more than $1b.

“The diocese believes this is the best way to ensure a fair and equitable outcome for all survivors and provide just compensation to the innocent people who were harmed while allowing the diocese to stabilize its finances and continue its sacred mission entrusted to it by Christ and the church,” said Helen Osman, director of communications for the diocese of Oakland.


To abuse survivors, the proceedings feel like a cop-out. “It’s just another way to silence us,” says Dan McNevin, who leads the Oakland chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap) support group.

Unlike trials, bankruptcy proceedings do not involve a discovery process, meaning key pieces of information about what church leaders knew may never be revealed.

McNevin knows how meaningful those revelations can be. As a child, he was an altar boy at his local parish in Fremont, south of Oakland, where he says he was groomed and abused by his priest. In 2003, following California’s first look-back window, he brought a suit against the diocese of Oakland, claiming it had knowingly shuffled his abuser from place to place to mask his crimes.

The diocese initially denied those claims, but during the trial, documents unearthed during discovery revealed that Father James Clark had been convicted of sexual abuse years before he arrived in Fremont.

“When we discovered that he had been arrested, my case was made,” said McNevin. “It probably helped settle 60 cases.” But those cases were settled individually, not collectively, as they would be in bankruptcy proceedings – a critical difference to McNevin.

“They’re going to try to slice and dice the survivors into categories,” he said. “How do you contemplate making those kinds of stark arbitrary decisions when every human being is different?”

Melanie Sakoda, survivor support coordinator at Snap, says the removal of the discovery process results in victim retraumatization. “What they’re really looking for is information,” she said. “After waiting all these years before finally getting themselves together enough to come forward and file a lawsuit, it’s disappointing. And it makes people angry.”


For Piscitelli, the suggestion that the church is unable to afford individual lawsuits is especially infuriating. He says those claims come across as disingenuous in light of the vast assets held by California’s Catholic organizations, which include properties in some of the country’s most expensive real estate markets.

“It’s duplicitous at best,” said Piscitelli. “It’s advantageous for the diocese.”

McNevin, who has spent years researching church holdings and tallying diocesan assets, agrees. Using public ownership and title records, McNevin claims to have found that the Oakland bishop as a corporation owns more than 2,000 pieces of land. Some, like churches and schools, are central to the church’s mission, and will therefore be excluded from settlement discussions. But others appear to be empty plots of land, rental properties or shopping centers, he says.

“I was stunned,” said McNevin, who has shared the appraisals – which Snap says total more than $3bn – with the Oakland bishop, Michael C Barber, and attorneys for the plaintiffs. “They have the assets to pay people whatever is needed,” McNevin claimed.

The diocese of Oakland did not respond to requests for clarification about how real estate will play into the proceedings, and would not confirm or deny that the Oakland bishop owns this much real estate, aside from saying that it owned approximately 100 parishes at its peak. Documents from the case state the diocese’s real property value is “undetermined” and list Furrer Properties, Inc – a stock corporation that owns and rents properties – as an asset.

The archdiocese of San Francisco flatly denies any accusations of secrecy or obfuscation. “Anyone can have access to the information. It’s available on a website that’s free of charge,” said spokesperson Marlow.


Another element the church emphasizes is that declining membership and rising costs, particularly during the pandemic, have squeezed budgets and limited the church’s ability to perform its duties. As a result, parishes have been forced to consolidate and close.

Day, the sociologist, says potential church closures are an equity issue, since immigrants comprise a large portion of parishioners. “These are people who are in need of jobs, in need of community,” she said. “So we are going to be failing these new migrants as well.”

Seeking bankruptcy protections safeguards worshippers, the church says, because it ensures that only the bishop is sued. “The parishes, the schools and the other ministries associated with the archdiocese aren’t included,” said Marlow.

Yet experts say the proceedings do affect the local Catholic community emotionally and spiritually. “There is a lot of pain and hurt,” said Day. Reilly added that in the past, sexual abuse allegations have caused some individuals to leave the church altogether.

Inside the Cathedral of Christ the Light during Easter mass, in Oakland, California.
Inside the Cathedral of Christ the Light during Easter mass, in Oakland, California.

Back in Oakland, Piscitelli finds it impossible to believe that the church’s motivations are anything but nefarious.

“As a victim and a survivor, this is an entity that has historically and habitually enabled child rapists for decades. They covered for them, they transferred them, they shuffled them and they enabled them. And now they’re stating that they want to provide compassionate and equitable solutions for survivors,” he said. “I don’t believe it for a second.”

Piscitelli said he has heard from a number of fellow survivors who feel the same way. Many of them elected not to file lawsuits for that very reason.

Those who did, however, plan to support one another in fighting against the legitimacy of the bankruptcy ruling in order to have their own individual trials. That’s the only way that, Piscitelli says, they can begin to close past wounds.

“It’s like looking at scenes on Netflix, but it’s real, and you had to live it.”

Complete Article HERE!

Catholic church loses landmark case over tactics that shield it from Australian abuse claims

— Guardian investigation found the church routinely uses deaths of paedophile priests to avoid paying or to reduce amount of settlements

High court rules Catholic church’s use of permanent stays to delay justice in abuse cases is unlawful.

By

The Catholic church has lost a landmark case over its controversial use of the deaths of paedophile priests to thwart survivors’ attempts at justice.

The high court on Wednesday delivered a significant blow to the church’s use of permanent stays in historical abuse matters, where it has sought to argue that delay, the death of perpetrators, and the loss of records render it unable to receive a fair trial.

Earlier this year, a Guardian investigation found that the church was now routinely using permanent stays in cases where perpetrators have died, either to defeat active claims before the courts or to low-ball survivors in settlement negotiations.

The tactic is causing profound harm to an already vulnerable group.

Critics say it is also immoral, given the church’s own role in delaying justice for decades, which included hiding abuse complaints from law enforcement and destroying or deliberately not keeping records.

Survivor groups argue the approach is at odds with the intent of Australian parliaments, which all removed time limits on bringing civil claims in recognition of the significant barriers to survivors coming forward.

One survivor, known as GLJ, whose case for compensation was permanently stayed, asked the high court to intervene and allow her case to proceed. GLJ alleges she was abused as a 14-year-old by Lismore priest Father Clarence Anderson.

Anderson died in 1996, well before GLJ’s complaint, and the Lismore diocese argued it was put in an unfair position, unable to properly investigate the allegation or mount a defence. The church says it was left “utterly in the dark” on whether the abuse occurred.

But GLJ’s lawyers say the church had held evidence about his abuse of other children from 1971, the year of his defrocking, and had ample opportunity to investigate his conduct more broadly in the 25 years prior to his death. Instead, it did nothing, her lawyers say.

The high court on Wednesday ruled in GLJ’s favour, saying permanent stays should only be granted in “exceptional” cases.

In their decision, chief justice Susan Kiefel and justices Stephen Gageler and Jayne Jagot said any other use of stays would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

“If a court refuses to exercise its jurisdiction to hear and decide cases in other than exceptional circumstances and as a last resort to protect the administration of justice through the operation of the adversarial system, that refusal itself will both work injustice and bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” they wrote.

The judges also said reforms removing time limits on survivors’ claims had changed the legal context.

“In this new legal context, the Diocese’s contention that any trial of the proceedings would be necessarily unfair must be rejected,” they wrote. “As the Diocese acknowledged that its case for a permanent stay for abuse of process was based only on necessary unfairness of a trial and not undue oppression or unfairness otherwise, no permanent stay is justified. The proceedings must go to trial.”

GLJ’s lawyers, Ken Cush and Associates, say their client is relieved and delighted at the outcome.

“GLJ hopes this landmark decision will also be able to help others right across Australia to bring their claims before courts despite the Catholic church again seeking to mount technical legal defences to their claims,” the firm said in a statement.

“GLJ is hopeful that this decision combined with the learnings and recommendations from $343,000,000 Royal Commission about the damage done by childhood sexual abuse will mean the Catholic church will take this opportunity to reflect on the morality of its continuing to mount these technical legal defences.”

Documents before NSW courts make it clear the church knew Anderson was abusing boys at least four years before GLJ’s alleged assault. It did not remove him from the clergy and instead shuffled him through parishes, where he continued to abuse boys.

Knowledge of his abuse was held at senior levels of the church, including by the then bishop of Lismore, who wrote in 1971: “[Anderson] has had a recurring trouble in sexual matters, especially homosexuality. This first came to my notice about some six years ago, and in every case young boys were involved. We have made persistent efforts to help him to overcome his problem, but apparently without any appreciable result.”

Survivors take an average of 22 years to come forward, according to the child abuse royal commission, and GLJ’s lawyers argued that made the loss of evidence and the deaths of perpetrators common.

Perry Herzfeld SC told the high court earlier this year that meant there needed to be a greater tolerance for the loss of evidentiary records in historical abuse cases, or the use of permanent stays would become routine, rather than exceptional.

“The inevitability of the long passage of time and the inevitability of the impoverishment of the evidentiary record means that one has to approach these applications with a greater tolerance for that,” he said.

The decision will be welcomed by survivors and advocates for reform.

Various jurisdictions, including New South Wales, where the use of stays is most prevalent, have been awaiting the outcome of the GLJ case before responding to calls for legislative change.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance has already met with the NSW attorney general to lobby for limits to be placed on the use of stays in historical abuse cases.

“In general these institutions have taken great care not to take records or to make sure that records go missing. In particular, some of them have kept no proper records of complaints made in respect of particular abusers,” Dr Andrew Morrison KC, ALA spokesperson, said in June. “So it’s a disgraceful situation that they should be able to take advantage of that to avoid proper compensation.”

Complete Article HERE!

Church abuse victim silenced by legal tactics watches it happen again

— As more states ease path for civil justice, institutions that harbored attackers deploy tactics to limit liability and silence survivors

Nicholas Finio, 9, in a sports photo taken before years of alleged abuse by a priest in his Harrisburg, Pa., church.

By

He knew “luck” wasn’t the right word the moment he said it.

But Nicholas Finio was trying to describe the way everything lined up perfectly for the reckoning he’d spent decades working toward.

He filed a lawsuit in time, he worked with an experienced legal team and a good therapist. He was ready to confront the defrocked priest whose persistent sexual abuse had turned his years as a blond-haired altar boy delighted to be chosen for the solemn duties at Mass into a nightmare. The terror of the abuse lived inside him for 15 years, it followed him through high school and college, into his relationships and his marriage. It even made him think about suicide.

“It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life; it was terrifying,” said Finio, now 34 and an assistant research professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. “The first time I ever told a lawyer about it I was dripping with sweat and my hands were shaking.”

And then?

Silence.

The Pennsylvania Archdiocese where Finio had been an altar boy reached for a shrewd and now-familiar playbook the Catholic Church has been deploying to muzzle survivors: declaring bankruptcy.

That meant the case that Finio had filed in 2018, when he was within the statute of limitations, that had been building for two years of discovery and paperwork, was folded into a bankruptcy hearing.

“The one piece of power I still had — the ability to speak to the public, in the courtroom — was taken away from me,” Finio wrote to me this week. “I did not have that ability as an abused child, and they took it away from me again as an adult survivor.

“The church, with its immense power, cash assets to pay lawyers, and actuarial science,” Finio wrote, “chose to relegate my story and those of dozens of other survivors to [E]xcel spreadsheets, paragraphs in emails, and [W]ord documents.”

It was as if “they had the cheat code,” he said.

>And that’s exactly what the Archdiocese of Baltimore did, filing for bankruptcy Sept. 29 — two days before Maryland’s Child Victims Act became state law. The law was intended to open the door for hundreds of survivors to sue the church for its part in thousands of horrific sexual acts committed against children, and for church leaders’ complicity in enabling priests and covering up the abuse.

He is speaking out now because other people are about to endure the “enraging” process that he went through.

“The bankruptcy judge didn’t talk to us,” he said. “There’s no getting interviewed by anybody — you’re just telling your story to the insurance companies and everybody sits around the table for a couple of years.”

Finio was part of the small committee of survivors who work with bankruptcy lawyers in these cases. They are seen by the court as “creditors.” More than two dozen U.S. dioceses have deployed the same tactic, according to the Catholic News Agency. They call it a “restructuring” and say — from their gilded and historic buildings — that the move is crucial to their survival.

“I had to deal with a lot of anger in the last three years,” he said. “Not really having any recourse, any ability to act on everything that has held me back for so long.”

Survivors, the lawyers who deal with these cases said, aren’t in it for the money. They want to be heard. They want the rest of the world to understand the adults’ complicity, the calculated coverups that kept them tortured for years.

“Survivors don’t want to get processed,” said Benjamin Andreozzi, who was Finio’s lawyer, has represented victims in New York and New Jersey and who is now representing about 20 survivors of abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

When Finio saw all of this playing out in Baltimore last week, he decided to speak publicly for the first time, forgoing the John Doe anonymity of his lawsuit. He wants the church, the priest and other survivors to hear his voice.

The priest who Finio says abused him, John G. Allen, 79, is living in an apartment in Harrisburg, according to public records. He did not respond to my email seeking information. His only public comment on record about the allegations against him was a guilty plea in 2020 to two counts each of indecent assault against a child under 13, indecent assault of a child under 16 and corruption of minors — all crimes involving altar boys, according to media reports.

The Dauphin County Court judge gave him five years of probation and life on the sex offender registry, where he submits his photos, address and a description of his tattoos (a Chinese Capricorn, a moon, a star and a four-leaf clover, all on his left thigh.) He submitted his most recent photo to the registry in August.

Ordained in 1970, Allen has a long history of sexual assaults and incidents, according to the grand jury report by the Pennsylvania attorney general.

Each time something happened, the church knew.

The grand jury report documents how the church knew Allen was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer. They heard from boys who said he paid them for sex acts. Strip poker. Nights in a hotel. Backroom invitations before services. And a bishop got the memo about Allen’s alleged confession — at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting — that he was obsessed with young boys, the report states.

And through all that, Allen was moved around nine parishes across central Pennsylvania

It was in 1999 that Finio was a 10-year-old altar boy at St. Margaret Mary Alacoque parish in Penbrook, dreading every time Allen was the priest celebrating Mass.

Finio said the priest groped and molested him dozens of times over the three years he served at the altar. He told no one at the time.

When Finio sued in 2018, the church offered a small settlement. He wanted a trial.

Then, the bankruptcy shut it down.

He wants the Baltimore survivors to know they are not alone, and that although they’re in for a long and frustrating process, they should persevere.

“Don’t stop fighting,” he tells them. For other survivors. For today’s children. For themselves.

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