THE GLOBE AND MAIL: A 1993 letter focuses on protecting the church’s image by preventing public knowledge of Bernard Prince’s abuse of altar boys
More than a decade before police got wind that a priest had molested several altar boys in small towns in the Ottawa Valley, Vatican and Canadian church officials knew about the matter and discussed in a letter how to keep it secret.
The letter, written in 1993, focused on protecting the church’s image by preventing the scandal from becoming public – the very essence of an international wave of allegations now battering the Roman Catholic clergy and the Vatican.
“It is a situation which we wish to avoid at all costs,” the late Bishop Joseph Windle of Pembroke, Ont., wrote in Feb. 10, 1993, to the Pope’s envoy to Canada, Carlo Curis.
The man Bishop Windle was writing about was then-monsignor Bernard Prince, now 75, a friend of the late Pope John Paul II who had just been posted to the Vatican as a high-ranking official working with missionary societies.
The year before Mr. Prince was sent to Rome, a man had complained to the diocese that the priest had molested him when he was a child. At least one Vatican archbishop, Jose Sanchez, now a cardinal, had been warned about Mr. Prince’s problem before he was sent to Rome, Bishop Windle said in the letter.
Bishop Windle wrote that he told Cardinal Sanchez that he agreed with posting Mr. Prince to the Vatican. “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.”
In his letter to the papal nuncio, Bishop Windle cautioned the Vatican to avoid honouring Mr. Prince because it could anger victims and prompt them to contact police.
“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. >>> Tu Thanh Ha | Friday, April 09, 2010
