Diocese Reaches out to Victims of Sex Abuse

By Francis Campbell
The Chronicle-Herald
November 18, 2013

http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1168224-diocese-reaches-out-to-victims-of-sex-abuse

Travelling conciliation forum to stop in seven communities

The Diocese of Antigonish wants to extend a healing hand to its parishioners.

Seven gatherings have been scheduled to talk about the past wrongs committed by the church and to search for productive ways to move forward.

"What these sessions are about is trying to hear what it’s been like to have been hurt by the church,” said Father Donald MacGillivray, a diocesan spokesman who now works out of St. Ninian’s Cathedral in Antigonish. “More specifically, how it’s been to have been hurt by a priest because of sexual abuse. That’s our starting point.

“It’s also about some kind of reconciliation, or at the very least, we'll contemplate how we can move on from this. With anything in life, it’s not that we don’t make mistakes. People make mistakes, institutions make mistakes and I’m not saying this to try to downplay the difficult stuff that’s come from this mistake. The reality is that there’s been a wrong here. There’s been a mistake. It’s about for us to try to move on. For the people who have been hurt to move on and, as an institution to move on from this.”

The gatherings will allow individuals to speak and provide for group discussions.

“The process here is to try to listen to one another, to listen to those who have been grievously hurt by this and to try to move toward reconciliation. This is a complicated thing. It won’t happen in one step and it’s not as if it hasn’t been happening up until now. It’s an attempt to move this whole process to another place.”

That travelling conciliation forum will stop in Stellarton on Monday, Antigonish on Nov. 26, Lower River Inhabitants on Nov. 27, Mabou on Nov. 28, Glace Bay on Dec. 9, Sydney River on Dec. 10 and North Sydney on Dec. 11. All meetings are set for 7 p.m.

Aside from the people who have suffered the insidious clerical abuse, many others churchgoers and lapsed parishioners feel disillusioned.

“It’s about those who feel betrayed, felt that the church has not acted well or done the things that it should have done,” MacGillivray said. “ It’s about providing space for people to talk about that also.

“The mistakes have been made. The question is what do we do now. This is an attempt to create a forum where there can be some honest dialogue and the church saying, ‘well, we messed up here. We done wrong. What else can we do other than to say we’re sorry.”

The mistakes made were costly. Last year, the diocese satisfied its legal obligations to pay out $15 million to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of its priests over the last 50 years. Raymond Lahey, the former bishop of the diocese, helped broker that settlement in August 2009, just weeks before he was charged with importing child pornography into Canada. He was later convicted and sentenced to time served.

To pay off the settlement, the diocese had to sell a large number of its properties and liquidate the bank accounts of many of its churches. As well, it borrowed $6.5 million from private lenders to make the payout.

Marcellin Chiasson, a 67-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s in Port Hawkesbury, said the seven gatherings sound like a good idea, although most parishioners in his area are preoccupied with potential church closings. The diocese kicked off a review process in the summer to decide which of its 62 churches it can afford to operate in Richmond, Inverness, Antionish, Guysborough and Pictou counties.

After a similar review in Cape Breton and Victoria counties, the diocese decided to close 16 of 43 churches there.

“There should be the opportunity for the people who have been in those (sexual abuse) situation to express their opinions,” Chiasson said. “I’m not sure that they’ve had that opportunity in the past. My involvement would be more or less in the closure of the churches. That may fall under the same category. One of the reasons they are having to close the churches is a lot of people have quit going to church, for many reasons, one of the big ones being the sexual abuse situation and the way that it was dealt with. A lot of people didn’t get an opportunity to express their frustrations, their anger and so if that’s the thing, I think it would be good that they have that opportunity.”