I’m home 🙂 A good trip, and great time with family, but oh my it’s cold back here in Canada!! The leaves are beautiful, but it’s freezing 🙁
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I have just posted an article from the Father Yvon Arsenault 11th hour guilty plea:
26 October 2016: Former NB priest pleads guilty to sexual abuse
Look at that picture! Just look at him! The SMILE!
Happy Days???
This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who spent how many of years of his priesthood molesting boys? and probably the bulk of his years as a priest betraying his flock while committing sacrilege after sacrilege after sacrilege? and after a years of ‘getting away with it’ spent three long years trying to make his victims look like outright liars while he denied the charges?
He has no shame.
No conscience.
Note that in the plea bargaining process 11 charges disappeared. Swoosh! Gone. Ten charges gone. That’s a lot. Perhaps that’s why he’s smiling? That truly is a cause for a clerical molester to rejoice, is it not? Nine, after all, sounds so much better than 19.
But watch. The fact that he entered a guilty plea before trial will probably be presented as a badge of honour at sentencing. Even if 1o charges disappeared en route, there will be kudos for the guilty plea.
Anyway, for the time being this clerical molester is out and about on “humanitarian reasons, ” presumably making arrangements for some unfortunate soul with special needs who has been reliant on him for care?
He’s back in court 24 February 2017 for a sentencing hearing.
I am relieved to see that every victim who wishes to do so will have opportunity to present his victim impact statement in person.
Please keep the victims in your prayers.
(I am curious. I will check tomorrow to see if the trial in the Miramich is still tentatively booked for 21-24 February 2017.)
Enough for now,
Sylvia
Yet, his guilty plea means that the understaffed and underfunded Crown will be saving a very serious chunk of change so that it can prosecute other clerical molestors, or perhaps another clerical fraudster… a wife beater, a drunk-driver, an insurance scammer, a primary care-giver abusing a disabled spouse etc. At this stage Father Arsenault’s social life is finished and he’ll be wondering when he’s gonna get beaten up and indeed raped – just for being himself – from now on. He’ll be safer while he’s incarcerated than when he’ll be released in the community. He was considerably downgraded in the food chain. So yeah, for sure, charges got dropped and that’s a shame. But when you look at the impact and the sentencing range available for those offences it wouldn’t have substantially changed things in terms of the duration of his incarceration. The prejudice suffered by the victims of Father Arsenault will not have been in vain. And they should hold their heads way way up high.
There is a problem with the proportionality of sentences in Canada as there is no political will to adequately fund our criminal justice system and our correctional systems. That’s not the fault of the victims and it’s not their problem; but that’s the answer. Canadians don’t want to pay the necessary taxes towards that end.
One solution which is being drafted will propose to recuperate the social costs of clerical abuse by seizing and liquidating the assets of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada to fund health-care and social services for victims of clerical abuse. When there will be no financial Church left to enable, cover-up and fund the defences of these clerical criminals, foreseeably they won’t be interested in the clergy as a front for a criminal career. The Church’s main opposition to this endeavour which was that the Church’s good works would be impacted became moot when the evidence clearly established that only 2% of charitable funds raised by the Church were actually used for it’s charitable causes.