CANADA
Montreal Gazette
FRANCOIS SHALOM
The Gazette
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Denis Vadeboncoeur, the pedophile priest convicted of sexual assault in Canada and facing sentencing for the same offence in France, may have committed similar crimes when he was posted in Brazil, a top church official in Quebec City said yesterday.
"It really wouldn't surprise me in the least if he had done some serious damage there, too," said Jean Pelletier, chancellor of the archdiocese of Quebec City, the Catholic Church's legal expert.
Alain Fiset, provincial superior for the church's St. Vincent de Paul Order, to which Vadeboncoeur once belonged, said from Quebec City that Vadeboncoeur was near Sao Paulo, Brazil, for several years in the early 1980s, prior to his 1985 arrest in Quebec City on charges of sexually assaulting minors. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 months in jail, but served only about five months.
He left Canada in January 1988 to take up a post in Evreux, a French town about an hour's drive west of Paris. He was arrested in December 2000 on charges of raping a minor, and again confessed to sexual assault.
The then-bishop of Evreux, Jacques Gaillot, was caught in a lie when he later claimed he hadn't been told of Vadeboncoeur's past.