Everyone Failed Shane Earle Church, Authorities Should Have Taken Closer Look at Teen's Allegations against Lahey — Archbishop, by Martin Currie, Chronicle Herald, October 7, 2009

'Everyone Failed Shane Earle'
Church, Authorities Should Have Taken Closer Look at Teen's Allegations against Lahey — Archbishop

By Martin Currie
Chronicle Herald
October 7, 2009

http://thechronicleherald.ca/News/1146352.html

The archbishop of St. John's says police and the Roman Catholic Church may have failed a Newfoundland man who alleged two decades ago that he found pornographic images of children in the house of a priest who later became a bishop and now faces child pornography charges in Ottawa.

Archbishop Martin Currie acknowledged in an interview Tuesday that officials may have done little to investigate a claim by Shane Earle that he saw pornographic magazines in the home of Raymond Lahey.

Bishop Raymond Lahey

"It seems that perhaps the whole system — the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, the social services and the church — perhaps everyone failed Shane Earle and for that I'm very sorry," Currie said from St. John's. "You'd think they would have made a closer look at it."

Earle, then a 16-year-old boy whose treatment at the Mount Cashel orphanage led to a public inquiry, said he became a close friend of Lahey's in the mid-1980s as he sought out someone he could trust.

Earle said Lahey became a confidante who took him to the beach, for drives and regularly had him over to his house in Mount Pearl, where the young man felt free to discuss his troubles at the notorious orphanage.

"He was a beacon of light in a very dark place," Earle said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his Halifax home.

Earle alleges that all changed when he made a routine visit to Lahey's house when the priest wasn't home. He said he discovered a stack of magazines of sexually aroused teen boys and explicit videos in his bedroom.

Years later and after he was treated for depression, Earle claims he told police and another local priest, Rev. Kevin Molloy, about what he allegedly saw. Earle also testified at a public inquiry into abuse at Mount Cashel in October 1989, that he saw something disturbing in Lahey's home as a teenager in 1985.

Molloy has said he informed the archbishop at the time, Alphonsus Penney, of the allegation, but that he didn't know what he did with the information, if anything.

Currie said he would ask Penney, who was in Ontario and unavailable for comment, how he responded when told of the allegation.

"Why didn't Bishop Penney do anything differently? I don't know. He's the only one that can answer that question. I can't," Currie said.

Molloy said Earle told him in the late 1980s only that he saw pornography but didn't indicate that it involved children and that he assumed the archbishop would deal with the claim.

"Shane told me that he was shocked to have witnessed there, to have seen there, pornography," Molloy said Monday from Florida. "I just simply got the word 'pornography' from him."

None of the allegations against Lahey has been proven in court.

Penney resigned in July 1990 after a scathing report into sex abuse by priests found that because the archbishop failed to act, "children continued to be abused by some priests, even while under criminal investigation."

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary is also reviewing Earle's allegation but has said so far it cannot find a record of it.

'It seems that perhaps the whole system — the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, the social services and the church — perhaps everyone failed Shane Earle and for that I'm very sorry.'