CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
JOE LOFARO, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
A former Ottawa priest convicted of molesting three altar boys in the 1960s and 1970s has been sentenced to 12 months of house arrest.
A judge found 80-year-old Jacques Faucher guilty last March of six counts of indecent assault and gross indecency on boys aged nine to 13 from the former Notre-Dame-des-Anges parish near Tunney’s Pasture.
The victims all told a similar story: Faucher would invite the boys to sit on his knee in private to pray or to watch hockey and he would start touching them. Court heard that he admitted to police that he had been sexually excited during these encounters, and that he sometimes ejaculated in his pants.
One of the victims told the court in a victim impact statement about the hatred and shame that “ate at me inside like a vile cancer” years after the abuse. Faucher apologized to his victims in court last October for his sex crimes. He said, “I regret them sincerely,” and, in the same speech, also criticized the media for its coverage of sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
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