sas:
Sexual abuse case re Olympics dismissed 2013. Same as five hockey players today. Swept under the rug. Money & power wins again.
Hakuin:
I just assume any catholic priest I meet is a rapist, saves time.
ken akurate:
Pedophilia is something like baptism, once a pedophile, always a pedophile.
Clearcut Acres:
There is a similar case involving a public figure who cannot even be named. The best reporting on that was in the Tyee. It is otherwise forgotten. If I wrote the culprit’s name here, the post would be deleted.
nancyjt:
The suppression of that name was downright weird. I couldn’t figure out what powerful figures were supporting that and why. I could only think that he had some powerful goods on them. It it all gets out, sooner of later, maybe we will learn that too.
ken akurate:
The media oxen have done a great job of ploughing that furrow under. But the question remains: Will that soil ever sprout new growth? It’s been fallow for a long time.
John Gregson:
Irish?
nancyjt
Is Furling an Irish name?
John Gregson:
I don’t know if it’s Irish, but we’re talking about the same individual.
Amazing how quickly that was swept under the rug!
Finewine 13 years ago:
Unrepentant – Canada’s Genocide
I sincerely hope the truth of what happened sees the light of day. The government, the RCMP, churches, and aboriginal chiefs squelch the torture, abuse and murder in the residential schools. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen in this case, and that the brave souls who are seeking justice do not experience what the victims in the documentary “Unrepentant – Canada’s Genocide” experienced. Please bear witness to these courageous people by watching the documentary on UTube.
Brenden MacDonald:
Arguing that groups with deep apparent injuries gave consent for abuse from a power of authority spinning tales… Monstrous and archaic. Dark ages prolonged.
Brenden MacDonald:
I was personally affected by a medical doctor and his friend starting at the time of those trials, over the course of a few years. They might start a teen off as “friends” then suddenly, as described in the article, turn to telling a person to take their clothes off in a dark, damned way. When they get a little bit older, it can kind of go “public” – it’s how long term trafficking pipelines work, too. See all the “news” – it’s ancient.
ingamarie:
Yes to everything you say. What’s more, if the right wing Christian nationalists get their way, women will be back to giving ‘assumed consent’ whatever old white guys with some position of authority wish to do to them.
Some of them think taking back women’s vote, and consigning them to mother and housekeeper inside a patriarchal family will solve society’s current problems.
Gives us all some indication of who it was exactly gained power inside the Christian Church….and what those power brokers have done….and wish to continue to do……to keep women available to service whatever needs arise in the patriarchs.
Sexual predation should have nothing to do with religion…or sports. That is seems rampant in both male callings should tell us a few things about male power….
And the universal Consent is assumes.
How the Catholic Church continues to survive is beyond me. Right wing Christian Nationalists are becoming more open about their long term goals………and every thinking person, but women especially, should oppose their narrow and pig headed views on women, sexuality and marriage.
Jesus would be appalled at their carryings on.
… I’ll never stopped being shocked at how mean spirited…..and patriarchally subservient so many so called Christians are….. For many, its just a social club I suspect.
I think it’s a sex trafficking and rape club more than a social club – the social club aspect is the facade hiding the sinister reality of rape and abuse of women and kids.
I’ve come to believe that a lot of our sexual perversions come from a form of Christianity that is anti-body, anti-sex. I don’t know how the aversion began or became entrenched…..but it also has long involved a double standard, whereby male sexuality is to be expected, but female desire a sign of immorality. We could be forgiven for thinking this is ‘natural’……but it doesn’t exist in the same way in all cultures.
nancyjt:
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
They seem to straying further and further from whatever that ideal was every day. Many of them now espouse ‘teachings’ that are in direct opposition to the original doctrines of true charity toward all.
Martin H.:
That comment, explanation, in the last paragraph makes me very sad to be a Catholic.I will never, to the day I die, understand why Catholic attendees do not leave the Church of Rape. You can have your religious beliefs and practices at home and in family. Supporting the Church, like supporting hockey, supports rape! Leave the fucking abusive monsters. If the church was empty except for the rapists, they’d only have each other to rape and the gruesome church would quickly lose its power and fall.
Sarah:
My ex and 2 younger siblings were brought up as Roman Catholics. None of them go to church anymore, and my ex became very anti after the garbage fed from around 10 years old. My in-laws could have lived in their church and that wouldn’t have made them any more Christian. Truly nasty people who turned off their logical brains when it came to religion. My father in law was extremely homophobic, refusing to hire anyone or do business with anyone who was LBGTQ. Of course the church supported his backward views!
The whole Residential Schools issue just adds to the required no-sx component forced on priests and nuns. Humans are sxual beings, so no wonder there have been thousands of instances of coverups of r*pe against minors, and we know for sure that there have been thousands more that were never reported, since many parents would never believe a child over a priest in the past, and even maybe even currently.
What really gets me is that it is the Church that makes up these rules and rituals that followers must follow, not God or Jesus. In regards to children, I view much to be brainwashing. Using religious teachings to embed positive values is one thing, but to embed divisiveness and intolerance against other segments of society is evil IMHO.The raping church’s hatred of women and girls is what really gets me; it promotes hatred of women and girls globally.
Gemma Hartley Aug 14, 2025:
Why does the church care more about homosexuality than pedophilia? Because it upsets the structure of power in a way that child abuse doesn’t.
exvangelical #exvangelicaltiktok #gaymarriage #supremecourt #newstiktok
“They dont care about kids, the care about power.”
A Priest and His Power: Revisiting a Doomed Rape Case, What a residential school trial reveals about how Canadian courts have interpreted consent by Rochelle Becker and Bethany Lindsay, Aug 15, 2025, The Tyee
When Bishop Hubert O’Connor stood trial in the 1990s for rape and indecent assault, he was one of the first Catholic clergymen in Canada to be charged with sexual offences committed at a residential school.
Court documents and records in the Investigative Journalism Foundation’s residential schools database show that the case against him was ultimately sunk by legal questions over how to determine consent in the context of young Indigenous students and staff facing sexual advances by a respected??? – more like a typical monstrous religious leader.
O’Connor was found guilty of raping a teenage former student working as a secretary at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School in B.C. in the 1960s. In his 1996 ruling, then-B.C. Supreme Court Justice Wally Oppal wrote he could not conclude she was able to consent. But that ruling was later overturned by a panel of Appeal Court justicescommon practice in Caveman misogynistic and extremely racist Canada for higher judges to let rapists go – notably if they are monstrous priests, while harming and revictimizing victims – even when rapists admit their guilt, who disagreed with Oppal’s ruling that consent obtained by the exercise of authority was not genuine.Filthy fuckers, all judges that enable rapists, notably Beverley McLachlin and Russell Brown with their hideous Jordan Ruling, while on the supreme court of Canada
Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Oppal told the IJF the questions at the centre of the O’Connor trial are ones that have animated sexual assault prosecutions for decades, and continue to be strikingly relevant today.
Like many people accused of sexual offences — from Sean (Diddy) Combs to the Hockey Canada players — O’Connor did not deny there was sex, but insisted it was consensual.that’s what all the fucking rapists say, even when their victims are children too young to know what rape or consent is (which is in my view the main reason Alberta with its super evangelical creepy Christian base is working to destroy sexual education and knowledge in Alberta kids – it’s easier to rape them when they don’t know what sex or consent is). Judges are the worst rape enablers in the world, serving of course, the vicious unjust patriarchy and raping religions, and rarely serving justice. When they or Canada’s self regulator of judges, the judicial council, do serve justice in a rape case, I believe they don’t do it to serve justice, rather to con the public into thinking they serve justice as a standard practice.
“What the case really turned on was genuine consent,” said Oppal, who has also served as a B.C. Court of Appeal justice, the province’s attorney general and commissioner for the inquiry into the Robert Pickton murders.
“One of the issues that arose in O’Connor and arises in other cases is, where a person is a person in authority, is there a power imbalance? Those types of cases may lead to consent that’s obtained by improper means.”that’s in most rape cases! There is limited equality in the world, when it comes to the sexes and genders with men gallingly still controlling most aspects of women’s lives and the little bit of equality that there is is constantly being attacked by religious raping politicians financed and goaded on by raping billionaires (eg Nazi Trump Regime, Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, Harper, IDU and the CPC etc. serving the male rich.)
While he stressed that it would be inappropriate to comment on the facts of the case or the Appeal Court decision, Oppal said these questions often pop up during trials involving priests, teachers or other authority figuresespecially lawyers, judges, politicians and billionaires.
“A typical case may involve a young person, a complainant, who felt that she gave consent to the sexual act that took place, but she only gave it because of the authority figure that was there and the authority figure is one that overwhelmed her, prevented her from having real consent,” he said.
Isabel Grant, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, put it plainly.
“There is no consent when agreement is induced by an authority figure,” she said.
In 1985, the Criminal Code was amended to make clear that there is no consent when “the accused induces the complainant to engage in the activity by abusing a position of trust, power or authority.”Still not enough to balance the scales of power between men and women/kids. Until the patriarchy is permanently overthrown, there will rarely be fair and just treatment of victims in the way that rapists are treated. Rapists still get insanely high levels of protection in legal systems globally, while victims are abused – the recent ultra vulgar hockey player gang rape case is an excellent example, as are the many cases were the rapist admits their crimes and the judges let them go to protect their futures, while viciously fucking over, blaming and shaming the victims.
Oppal said that in the years since O’Connor’s alleged crimes, there have been some improvements in how the legal system treats victims of sexual assault. For one thing, defence lawyers are no longer allowed to question complainants about their sexual history.
“We did not want to discourage women from coming forward and complaining about these acts that took place against them without their consent, because the old law had a real effect of discouraging people from coming forward,” he said.Oh, FFS! Very little has changed. In fact, Canadians judges recently made it much worse for rape victims, notably Russel Brown and Beverley McLachlin et al on the supreme court of Canada with their hideous and intentionally cruel Jordan Ruling (certainly, criminals must have their charter rights protected, but, the rest of us non criminals, notably victims of crimes, must have our rights protected too which rarely happens – especially not in rape cases) and the rulings with judges using automation to let free rapists and those who commit horrific brutal assaults – even though those criminals intentionally drank or took drugs to excess. Whenever there is a tiny bit of balance for rape victims, the patriarchy smashes in on the system via its judges who are obedient to the patriarchy and happy to piss on justice and the rule of law. The severe problem of misogyny (and racism) in politicians appointing like minded (misogynistic and racist) judges to the bench needed to be addressed decades ago, and still has not been. I believe it never will because the misogynistic bigoted bible and other religious texts and religions have too much power and are too vicious in their lust for favour from their fairy tale gods, to ever back off. Worse, many ultra religious men believe it’s their right, if not duty, to rape. Evil douche fuckers, enabled by our judicial industry.
‘We knew our place’
O’Connor’s history at St. Joseph’s is laid out in documents from the IJF’s database Residential Schools: The Hidden Stories, which detail his time as principal of the residential school in Williams Lake, B.C., also known as Cariboo Residential School, from 1961 to 1967.
In 1991, he was charged with multiple sex crimes against students and Indigenous women who had worked in the institution.
O’Connor was the third Catholic cleric to be accused of sexual misconduct in residential schools, the first being Father Harold McIntee, who pleaded guilty to 17 counts of sexual assault, followed by Oblate Brother Glenn Doughty, who would eventually be convicted of dozens of sex crimes.
Though the allegations against O’Connor were shocking, Oppal said, “the circumstances that took place in O’Connor are not all that unusual in view of the myriad allegations and facts that were proven about the abuses that took place in these schools.”
O’Connor’s first trial on four counts of rape and indecent assault began in 1992, but the charges were stayed over non-disclosure of records by the Crown. In my view, politicians and their staff, judges and lawyers and their staff, are servants of the Patriarchy, they enable rape to keep the rich and powerful raping. The more religious authorities are, the nastier and worse the enabling because of the rape-promoting religious texts, and rampant misogyny in religions. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually ordered a new trial, which began in B.C. Supreme Court in 1996.
Standing in Oppal’s courtroom, O’Connor faced two charges of rape and two of indecent assault against women who had been students or former students turned staff members at the time of the alleged offences.
During the trial, O’Connor claimed he had consensual relations with both alleged rape victims and that “the indecent assault offences simply did not occur” with the other two complainants, according to Oppal’s decision.The Patriarchy believes and serves rapists, not rape (or frac) victims, its authorities’ purpose for being, is to enable rape and protect rapists.
On the stand, the women described O’Connor as having great authority. One told the court she had been taught to respect and obey the nuns and priests by her grandmother, as they were authority figures. Another said, “We knew our place.”I was taught same, but after a summer of endless rapes and brutal violence by a married christian man (enabled by his wife) when I was nine, I privately decided religion is shit, made up garbage; I chose to no longer accept the nightly prayer by my grandmother pushing that only Jesus is allowed in my heart which makes all the bad things ok. Bullshit pimped to make kids accept being raped. I knew my place was less than human because I was a girl – my family made that clear every fucking day, but, I decided not to accept their attempts to con me with religion.
In his decision, Oppal found O’Connor guilty of raping a 19-year-old secretary who’d previously been a student at St. Joseph’s. She testified that during the first assault, O’Connor asked her to come to his room so he could give her a Christmas present, but instead he asked her to sit on the bed and remove her clothes; she said she complied because she was terrified and thought she might lose her job.
There were as many as a dozen other sexual encounters after that, and she would later discover she was pregnant.
“Her apparent failure to resist his advances is entirely understandable when one considers their relative backgrounds and positions,” Oppal wrote.
“The complainant went to a residential school when she was six years old. As a Catholic, she was taught to respect and obey the priests who were authority figures. Father O’Connor was not only her priest but was also her employer.”Like mass kid raping, mass murdering Israel, the catholic church needs to be shut down, their unjust gross power taken away. Both are too abusive and law violating to balance any good they may produce.
Oppal also found O’Connor guilty of one of the counts of indecent assault, but acquitted him of the other two charges.
The other alleged rape victim was also impregnated by O’Connor, according to the decision. When the baby was put up for adoption, he filled out paperwork falsely claiming the father was an “accountant.” Oppal ultimately found, however, that there were too many discrepancies in the woman’s evidence to convict.
O’Connor appealed the convictions, and in 1998, the B.C. Court of Appeal ordered a new trial on the rape charge, writing that Oppal “did not resolve the issue of consent.” The judgment states that under the Criminal Code at the time of the alleged rape, consent could not be negated by the fact that the perpetrator was in a position of power.
The court entered an acquittal on the indecent assault charge, finding the verdict unreasonable because O’Connor had not been in Williams Lake at the time.
Regardless of the court’s decisions surrounding the accusations against O’Connor and whether consent had been given freely or was coerced, the Indigenous community had a different perspective on justice.
One complainant, Marilyn Belleau, told reporters she was tired of “being victimized by the courts.” Instead, the alleged victims turned to restorative justice, where they could sit with O’Connor and explain how his actions affected their lives. Thus, a seven-hour healing circle commenced in 1998.
In a Vancouver Sun article about the healing circle included in an addendum to the school narrative about St. Joseph’s in the IJF database, Belleau said O’Connor looked uncomfortable throughout the entire process, and while she didn’t believe the apology he gave was genuine or an admission of guilt, the circle was necessary for her community to move forward and become stronger.
There would never be another trial. Crown prosecutors stayed the remaining rape charge after O’Connor’s apology.So gross, so unjust, so unfair, but typical of the rapist-protecting legal-judicial industry.
As for O’Connor, following his time at St. Joseph’s, he went on to become the bishop for the diocese of Prince George, B.C., a position he would resign after he was criminally charged.
Despite the plethora of credible accusations thrown his way, O’Connor retained the honorific of “most reverend” and held his title of bishop emeritus, essentially a retired bishop, until his death in 2007. He was buried alongside his brother priests at the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Cemetery in Mission, B.C.Piece of shit human, Piece of shit rape religion, Piece of shit legal-judicial industry run by the Piece of shit Patriarchy.
When asked how a bishop could retain his titles after such horrific accusations had been posed against him, Adam Exner, the former archbishop of Vancouver, said in a 1996 Vancouver Sun article in the St. Joseph’s addendum, “Ordination is something like baptism. Once you are baptized, you cannot become unbaptized. Once you are ordained, you cannot become unordained.”Intentional, of course, and therein, lies the raping problem. Fucking leave the kid raping and kid murdering catholic church, if you any humanity in you, leave the fucking douche church! It’s the only way to stop the masses of kid rapes by the church
Refer also to:
2022: True: “Statistically your child is far safer with a Drag Queen rather than a Priest.”
David Climenhaga Aug 13, 2022:
I heard someone whinging on CBC yesterday that drag queens shouldn’t be able to read stories to kids in buildings paid for by taxpayers, viz., libraries. Just remember, churches are paid for by taxpayers too, through their tax exemption, so men in gowns can read stories to kids.
