A group dedicated to addressing abuse by the clergy is calling on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Grand Falls to name the priest it sent to a treatment facility in Toronto in the 1970s after receiving complaints about him from the parents of a child.
End Clergy Abuse (or ECA) says then-Bishop Alphonsus Penney sent the unnamed priest to the Southdown Institute in 1975 after the parents complained about his conduct with their child. ECA says more than 50 years later the public still doesn’t know that priest’s name, whether he returned to the ministry, or whether there are other potential victims.
According to End Clergy Abuse, an affidavit was recently filed in a Grand Falls-Windsor courtroom by the Institute’s former insurer, seeking records on Father Leonard Joseph Kelly and the unnamed priest, but the application was discontinued last month after Southdown revealed that decades of clinical files were destroyed following the adoption of a new records policy in the year 2000.
Gemma Hickey stands next to the monument to Mount Cashel victims in this file photo.
ECA founder Gemma Hickey says “every route to the truth has failed” and there is nothing that requires the church to reveal the information to the public.
Hickey is calling on the diocese to “name him,” and to disclose every priest “credibly accused” of sexual abuse – as determined by an independent review – who was sent to Southdown, and what happened to each of them.
Hickey is also calling on every diocese in Canada to preserve records relating to priests being sent to Southdown, and for Southdown to preserve its remaining records and explain the policy that lead to the older records being destroyed.
