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	Hush Culture Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2009 http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Hush+culture/2073947/story.html If there's anything the Roman Catholic Church should have learned over the last half-century, it's how not to deal with allegations of sexual abuse. Yet after all this time and all those bitter lessons, the church still seems to be fighting an impulse to think first of protecting the institution, and only second of protecting potential victims. Raymond Lahey resigned as bishop of Antigonish "for personal reasons" shortly after being charged with possessing and importing child pornography. He had been stopped at the Ottawa airport on Sept. 15, on his return from a trip to Britain, and Canada Border Services Agency officials seized his laptop because of images they say they found on it. This is, of course, difficult news for the diocese and for all Catholics. But even more disturbing than the charge against Lahey is the revelation that some people, within the church and without, weren't surprised. In the 1980s, then-Father Lahey was a priest and a mentor to some of the boys at the infamous Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland, the site of a horrifying sexual abuse scandal that broke in 1989. Shane Earle, one of the boys who was abused at Mount Cashel, says he told police 20 years ago that he had seen pornography involving teenage boys in Lahey's bedroom. Earle also told Kevin Molloy, a priest who now lives in Florida. Molloy says he called Lahey and "gave him a warning." Molloy told Canwest News Service: "It was 20 years ago, over 20 years ago, that I had spoken to him on the very topic of pornography and I was appalled to realize obviously my message didn't get through to him." Lahey hasn't been convicted of anything and the allegations from the 1980s haven't been proven either. It's possible he's entirely innocent. But whether he is or isn't, the church certainly had reason for concern, reason to follow up. Molloy says he told the archbishop of the day what Earle had told him. That archbishop, Alphonsus Penney, resigned after the Mount Cashel scandal. It's unclear what, if anything, he did about the allegations from Shane Earle. Police are now reviewing their old files to determine why those old allegations led nowhere. Twenty years later, Lahey had become a trusted broker in a settlement between the church and people who were abused as children by members of the clergy in Antigonish, going back to 1950. A few weeks before he was charged with possession of child pornography, Lahey formally apologized to the victims and assured them that "we are now trying to right those past wrongs." If the church had any reason to suspect Lahey of sexual deviancy, it was the height of irresponsibility to allow him to be the face of Catholicism in this settlement negotiation and apology. Canadians understand that no individual, of any faith or none, is perfect. It isn't the actions of Catholic priests as individuals that is making people lose faith in the institution, but the fact that dangerous secrets still have a tendency to get lost, hushed up or forgotten.
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