Letter shows Canadian church knew of abuse allegations before priest’s promotion to Vatican

Canadian church tried to keep abuse scandal secret

TORONTO — A letter written by a late Canadian bishop shows church officials in Canada knew of sexual abuse allegations involving a priest before his promotion to a top Vatican post and then discussed with Vatican officials how to keep the scandal from becoming public.

The four-page letter was written on Feb. 10, 1993 by the late Bishop Joseph Windle of Pembroke, Ontario, and sent to the pope’s envoy to Canada, Carlo Curis. Its contents were released this week as an exhibit in a civil lawsuit.

The letter raised concerns about Monsignor Bernard Prince, a friend of the late Pope John Paul II. Prince served as secretary-general of the Vatican’s Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which works with missionary societies, from 1991 until he retired in 2004.

Windle advised the Vatican to avoid honoring or promoting Prince in any way because it might anger abuse victims and lead them to file criminal charges or civil lawsuits.

“The consequences of such an action would be disastrous, not only for the Canadian church but for the Holy See as well,” the bishop wrote.

The Vatican embassy in Ottawa referred all requests for comment to the Pembroke diocese and to the Vatican in Rome. Vatican officials in Rome did not answer their phones.

In a statement released Friday, the Diocese of Pembroke said the recently released documents “demonstrate it has done its best to be proactive and responsible” in following Canadian church policies on handling allegations of sexual abuse by priests. The current Pembroke Bishop Michael Mulhall expressed “sympathy and concern” for Prince’s victims and pledged that the diocese would be “open and transparent” in dealing with the facts of the case.

It wasn’t until 2005 that the Ontario Provincial Police received a complaint from a man claiming that he had been molested by Prince in 1969. Prince is currently serving a four-year sentence after being convicted in 2008 of sexually molesting 13 boys between 1964 and 1984. He was defrocked last year by Pope Benedict XVI.

But in 1990, a man complained to Ontario church officials that he had been abused by Prince as a boy. The victim told The Associated Press that he indicated to a Pembroke church official that he wouldn’t contact the police, but wanted to make sure that Prince would be supervised and counseled by church officials.

The victim, a 53-year-old who cannot be identified because of a court publication ban, said the Pembroke diocese clearly knew of allegations against the priest a year before Prince became a top Vatican official in 1991.

“That’s the sad thing. He was promoted,” the victim said.

In its statement, the Pembroke diocese said the victim “was encouraged to refer the allegations to the civil authorities” in accordance with Canadian church protocols, but “his decision at the time was not to do so.”

However, the victim in a response to the diocese’s statement e-mailed to The Associated Press disputed its account.

“At no point in my meetings with the diocese did they encourage me to call the police,” he said. “At no point did they offer to call the police on my behalf.” The victim said that Windle never attended any meetings with him and church officials at the time.

In 1992, a year before the letter was written, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a protocol that recommended that bishops should contact police if allegations of sexual abuse involve minors.

In his 1993 letter, Windle said other Canadian bishops were informed of the complaint, and the Toronto archbishop had indicated Prince was no longer welcome in his archdiocese unless he underwent psychiatric treatment.

Windle wrote that when Prince was first proposed for the Vatican position, he had advised at least one Vatican archbishop, Jose Sanchez, now a cardinal, about the complaint against Prince. However, Windle said he advised Sanchez that he believed the Vatican appointment should still proceed.

Windle said he had told Sanchez that “while the charge against Fr. Prince was very serious, I would not object to him being given another chance since it would remove him from the Canadian scene.”

Windle wrote that “at that time we were under the impression that the incident was isolated, in the distant past, and there was little or no danger of any scandal ever emerging.”

But after Prince took up his Vatican post, Windle wrote the papal nuncio in Ottawa that the “situation has become more precarious” because the Canadian church was now aware that there were four or five men claiming to have been abused by Prince when they were boys.

Windle expressed concern that any papal recognition of Prince might “trigger a reaction among the victim (s),” resulting in criminal charges or civil lawsuits being filed that would “prove extremely embarrassing” both to the Vatican and Pembroke diocese. He wrote that all of the bishops of Ontario agreed with his assessment.

Windle wrote that a public scandal had been avoided only because the victims “are of Polish descent and their respect for the priesthood and the Church has made them refrain from making these allegations public or laying a criminal charge against a priest.”

The Pembroke diocese said that at the time Windle wrote his letter there was still uncertainty about the allegations against Prince which were gradually surfacing from different sources. It noted that Windle wrote in his letter that the church has “no way of assessing the total accuracy of these reports.”

Windle’s letter said that he had previously discussed the Prince case with the papal nuncio by telephone and fax. The letter’s contents were first reported by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper on Friday.

The letter was entered as an exhibit this week in a civil lawsuit filed by abuse victims against the Pembroke diocese that seeks answers to a variety of questions, including whether the Vatican was informed after the diocese received a complaint about Prince and if so why the priest continued to serve in a prestigious post at the side of the late pope.

Prince, who grew up in a Polish settlement in Ontario, became friends with Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow before he became Pope John Paul II. There are pictures of the late pope with Prince, who would often arrange meetings between the pope and fellow Canadians. In her autobiography, singer Celine Dion included a 1984 photo of her with Prince and the pope at the Vatican.

Prince was ordained in 1963 and held various administrative posts in Ottawa and Toronto before being moved to the Vatican in 1991. He returned to Canada in 2006 after criminal charges were brought against him.

“He anally raped 11-year-old boys. This is graphic stuff. The guy is a monster,” said Rob Talach, a lawyer for some of the victims.

In a separate case involving the Canadian church, a bishop already facing child pornography charges in Ontario has also been accused in a civil lawsuit of sexually assaulting a young boy who lived at an orphanage in eastern Canada.

The civil lawsuit filed this week in the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador alleges that Raymond Lahey simulated anal intercourse and fondled the young boy between 1982 and 1985.

The lawsuit alleges the plaintiff first met Lahey in 1982 when he served as a priest at the Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Lahey was charged in September with possessing and importing child pornography after border agents examined his laptop at an Ontario airport. He resigned as head of the Catholic diocese of Antigonish in Nova Scotia just before the pornography charges became public.