Sex abuse survivor can reopen settled case against Catholic diocese
When she accepted a civil settlement from the Roman Catholic Church 18 years ago, Irene Deschenes was defeated. “We are tired, we want closure and are hesitant to believe we can or will get justice from the court process,” she wrote in an email to her lawyer before accepting the terms in 2000.
What Deschenes, the Catholic Diocese of London and disgraced ex-priest Charles Sylvestre wouldn’t know is that settlement would send Deschenes on a determined course to expose the abusive Sylvestre and hold the church accountable.
In a groundbreaking decision, Superior Court Justice David Aston, who quoted Deschenes’ email, granted her motion and allowed the sexual abuse survivor to reopen her settlement after almost two decades
“My goal here is to hold the Roman Catholic Church accountable for their unspeakable treatment of survivors,” Deschenes said at a news conference in Strathroy. “This is a continuation of my fight for justice, for me and other known and unknown survivors.” When Deschenes, abused between 1970 and 1973 when she attended St. Ursula’s Church in Chatham, and another survivor filed a civil suit against the diocese, Sylvestre hadn’t been convicted of 47 counts of indecent assault of little girls across the region and the church hadn’t been swamped with civil claims.
Much of the credit for setting the criminal cases in motion goes to Deschenes, who went to the Chatham police in 2005 after collecting stories from women across the region who had been abused by Sylvestre at parishes over four decades.
Her persistence led to the avalanche of victims coming forward, the charges, the subsequent guilty pleas and the then 84-year-old’s four-month jail sentence. He died while incarcerated.
Two months after Sylvestre went to jail, the Diocese of London announced an administrative assistant had discovered statements from three 11-year-old girls made in 1962 to the Sarnia police that had been misfiled in an accounting cabinet.
Around the same time, Sylvestre was sent to Roxboro, Que., but there is no evidence the transfer was related to the police reports. While no charges were laid at the time, the statements were forwarded to Bishop John Cody, but he died in December 1963 “apparently without telling anyone about the police reports,” Aston noted. That flew in the face of what the church had insisted after Deschenes had filed her civil claim in 1996. “In that proceeding, the diocese denied liability, asserting specifically that it had no direct, indirect actual or constructive knowledge of the alleged sexual propensities or acts of Sylvestre prior to the assaults against the plaintiff.”
The church claimed it only knew about any allegations after 1989. Evidence was given that no one had any idea that Sylvestre was a problem until after another priest alerted the diocese to alcohol issues.
Aston agreed that Deschenes’ original claim was compromised because she couldn’t prove that the church knew that Sylvestre was sexually abusing girls. The lack of disclosure was “a material misrepresentation.”
Aston noted that since Deschenes’ original case, much has been exposed about coverups of pedophile priests by the church in the 1960s and 1970s. “Since then, the Diocese has dramatically changed its ways in Southwestern Ontario. It has genuinely tried to make amends,” Aston wrote. “However, it is still responsible for its historic conduct ... it would be wrong in the circumstances of this case to protect the settlement.”
The Diocese of London declined to comment on the case because it is still before the courts. Deschenes won’t have to prove liability as that was dealt with in Aston’s decision, but damages still have to be won. That may be decided in a settlement, but if the case must go to trial, it could be two to four years before it’s finished. Deschenes said if the church had acted on the 1962 reports and “had done the right thing” by removing the priest from the church, “I wouldn’t be here today and there wouldn’t have been more little girls harmed by Sylvestre. “They had all the proof of his prior offences but kept it to themselves, starting with the 1962 Sarnia police report.” Deschenes said when she went to the church at age 31 to report the abuse she had hoped the church would apologize and offer her help. Instead, she says, there was more of an effort to protect the priest, not the victims.