The London diocese has come up with a code of conduct for priests and a safe environment policy, writes Trevor Wilhelm
22 July 2011
By Trevor Wilhelm., Postmedia News
When the terrified teen finally mustered enough courage to report the ongoing sexual abuse Father Barry inflicted on him, the priest he confided in shut the door in his face, flicked off the porch light and left him standing in darkness.
It had taken 15-year-old Richard Corbett a year to find the strength to tell his mother about what Windsor, Ont., priest Barry Glendinning was doing to him. She dragged him down to the rectory.
“She was awful mad,” Corbett said during questioning in his civil lawsuit, launched four decades after the abuse. “We talked to Father Nouvion and basically he told us just to go home and pray. He turned the porch light off. Shut the door.”
Corbett was likely the first victim of pedophile priest Barry Glendinning to come forward and report his abuse to the church. The diocese shuffled the priest out of town and set him up at a new church. That was in 1965.
Glendinning would spend the next few decades abusing children from London, Ont., to Edmonton, as diocese officials quickly and quietly shuffled him out of town each time there was a complaint.
It was a pattern repeated with other priests that would lead to dozens of lawsuits and victims, lawyers and judges accusing the diocese of cover ups and “wilful blindness.”
Glendinning is one of at least 22 priests in the London diocese have been convicted, charged or sued for sex crimes against children.
Experts and abuse survivors say because pedophiles often prey on multiple children, the number of victims is likely much higher, possibly in the hundreds.
“For all the victims who do come forward, so many others remain shrouded in silence and/or guilt and shame,” said Irene Deschenes, one of the first victims to accuse Rev. Charles Sylvestre, the notorious Windsor priest who assaulted dozens of children over four decades and sparked a major overhaul of the diocese’s approach to sexual abuse.
Three London diocese clergymen have been kicked out of the priesthood for sex-abuse crimes – a move previously unheard of in Canada.
Glendinning, Konstanty Przybylski and John Harper were defrocked after a series of highly publicized sex-abuse scandals.
Bishop Ronald Fabbro said the option has become a central part of widespread change at the diocese that includes replacing the sex abuse policy that came out in 1989.
One change the diocese has made is to believe victims when they come forward, which Fabbro admits was “a problem in the past.”
Glendinning liked to befriend families with widowed mothers or those with lots of boys. When police arrested him at the London seminary in 1974 and searched his room, they found more than 250 colour photographs of 30 different young boys, undressed and engaged in various sex acts.
In 1974, Glendinning was convicted of six counts of gross indecency against five boys and one girl. His punishment was three years probation. The probation order, dated May 14, 1974, stated he was not allowed to work with children.
Superior Court Justice. J. G. Kerr – who, in 2004, made a $1.4-million judgment against the London diocese – came to the “inescapable conclusion” that the diocese “encouraged secrecy, if not wilful blindness on the part of its priests with respect to sexual deviance.”
A Safe Environment Policy for the diocese of London and the Code of Conduct for Ordained Priests – which among other things directs priests to avoid one-on-one meetings with minors – was published in 2008.
Rev. John Sharp, vicar general of the diocese, said the diocese has faced more than 100 sex-abuse lawsuits. Sylvestre’s victims alone have launched 78 cases. At last count, 71 of those had been settled.
Sharp, now tasked with overseeing disposition of the lawsuits, said the church handled abuse differently in the past because it didn’t fully understand the problem.
Rev. Thomas Doyle, a U.S. priest who lost his job for criticizing the church, said it’s “ridiculous” that no one understood it was wrong when an adult “rapes or otherwise molests a young child.”
“Common sense tells anyone that’s wrong and somebody who does that commits a crime and shouldn’t be let loose,” said Doyle, a canon law expert who has written books on the subject.
What a surprise! I started reading the Ottawa Citizen this evening, and lo and behold, there on page A6 is a large part of Trevor Wilhelm’s article which ran in today’s Windsor Star. This is a pleasant surprise.
I don’t know if the Citizen ran the article because someone there remembers that then Father Barry Glendinning has close ties to Ottawa.
From around 1987 Glendinning, a liturgist, was part of the team teaching at the Summer Institute on Pastoral Theology at Ottawa’s University of St. Paul.
Glendinning had been convicted in London Ontario 1973. In 1983 he admitted molesting and sodomizing a number of young boys in the Archdiocese of Edmonton Alberta. (It was known that there were at least 15 boys in the Edmonton area who had been molested by Glendinning. Glendinning was recycled to Edmonton in 1976 to teach Liturgy at St. Stephen’s Seminary. In short order he was assisting at rural parishes, setting up altar boy socieities, and, yes, sad to say for those young lads, molesting )
And there he was, a known serial molester, teaching liturgy at St. Paul’s.
Glendinning’s days teaching at a Pontifically Chartered University were numbered after the media was tipped in the early 2000s.
That’s the Ottawa connection. Glendinning was around Ottawa for a few weeks every summer – for about 13 years.
I wrote about him in 1999: The Painted Preying Liturgist Not a pretty story.
Anyway, nice to see the article in the Ottawa Citizen.