Canadian police have issued a new arrest warrant for a French priest accused of sexually assaulting Inuit children more than 30 years ago, authorities said on Tuesday.
“In September, the police received a complaint of sexual assault which occurred approximately 47 years ago,” detailed in an email to AFP the police of Nunavut, Canadian Northern Territory.
And following this investigation, at the end of February “Father Johannes Rivoire, 93, was charged with sexual assault” and an arrest warrant issued, according to the police.
On Monday, an Inuit delegation visiting the Vatican to discuss abuses committed in residential schools by members of the church asked Pope Francis to personally intervene in the case.
Inuit representatives said at a press conference that they had asked the pontiff to press for the priest to be “tried for the wrongs he has caused” in Canada or France.
This French priest, who spent three decades in the Canadian Far North, has already been the subject of an arrest warrant which has never been acted upon. He left Canada in 1993 and lives in France, in Lyon.
Interviewed recently by the newspaper Le Monde, he proclaims his innocence.
The policy of assimilation implemented by the Canadian authorities vis-à-vis the Amerindian peoples for decades led to numerous abuses, which are recognized today.
The historic meeting this week between the pope and a delegation of the various Canadian indigenous peoples should make it possible to “recognize the responsibility” of the Church in the system of residential schools for indigenous children.
The discovery of hundreds of unmarked children’s graves in recent months has rocked Canada and many survivors are now awaiting an apology from the pope.
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1980s, some 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly recruited into more than 130 residential schools across the country, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
Thousands have never returned – the authorities estimate their number between 4,000 and 6,000. In 2015, a national commission of inquiry called this system “cultural genocide”.
Reference-www.journaldemontreal.com