CANADA
The Chronicle-Herald
DAN ARSENAULT CRIME REPORTER
Published September 3, 2014
A former Halifax priest who left Nova Scotia in the 1990s to work with Toronto’s homeless has died.
Rev. Robert Cashin, who would have turned 64 this Sunday, was found dead inside his apartment last weekend. He hadn’t been in contact with his family for three weeks and they summoned the police to check in on him.
“They believe it to be natural causes,” a cousin, Brenda Michalski of Dartmouth, said Wednesday. “He was a very kind, loving individual. He had a heart of gold.”
Cashin was ordained into the priesthood in 1979 and spent much of the next 20 years at Saint Mary’s Basilica and Saint Thomas Aquinas parish in Halifax. He also worked in the Mount Saint Vincent Motherhouse, Chezzetcook and Sheet Harbour, Michalski said.
In 1997, Cashin filed a lawsuit in Nova Scotia Supreme Court accusing Msgr. Albert O’Driscoll, the former rector at the basilica, of sexually assaulting him twice in 1979.
He’s believed to be the first priest in Canada to allege sexual abuse at the hands of fellow clergy.
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