CBC News: the fifth estate - The Good Father

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Aired February 28
2007 at 9pm
on CBC-TV
& March 2, 2006
at 10pm ET/PT
on CBC Newsworld

WATCH the fifth estate ONLINE:

Runs: 41:18
Video available in Windows Media Player.

REPORTER:
Hana Gartner
PRODUCER:
Catherine Annau
ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS:
Sheila Mandell
Andrea Lee
Lynette Fortune

ON-LINE INTERVIEW

Read/watch an
interview with Rob Talach, a lawyer who specializes in sexual abuse cases and represents 21 of Father Sylvestre's victims. MORE

THE GOOD FATHER

The flat, fertile farmland of southwestern Ontario is populated with towns and communities whose spiritual lives have been tended, for generations, by Roman Catholic clergy. The priests of these communities are the living symbols of God on earth and the relationship with their parishioners is based on trust and faith.

Father Charles Sylvestre was convicted of 47 counts of indecent assault in 2006.

Father Sylvestre: convicted pedophile

But, for more than four decades, beginning in the 1950s, at least one Catholic priest preyed on the young girls of his parishes. By the time he was arrested and convicted, Father Charles Sylvestre was identified as one of the worst pedophile priests in Canadian history. The number of his known victims is in the dozens, but is potentially far greater than that.

In the autumn of 2006, the fifth estate began investigating the priest's history of abuse, who knew about it and when and why he was able to serve in parishes for more than forty years.

What the fifth estate found was that senior clergy in the Diocese of London knew as far back as 1962 that young girls had complained about Father Sylvestre's abuses. Their response, at the time, was to send Sylvestre to a retreat in Montreal before police investigators could question him. They would send him two more times to treatment facilities. Over time, victims reported the abuse to their teachers and parents; many weren't believed, and "Sylvestre the Molester," as he became known, kept on. He retired in 1993.

Victims speak out publicly

But, some of his victims, now grown women, began to speak out publicly and in 2005 the Chatham-Kent police arrested the 82-year-old priest on charges of indecent assault, rape and sexual intercourse with a female under 14. He pleaded guilty in August, 2006 to 47 counts of indecent assault, one for each of his 47 victims. He went to prison for three years on October 6, 2006. He died in a prison hospital of natural causes on January 22, 2007.

Charles Sylvestre left a legacy of what one crown attorney calls "psychological carnage". The fifth estate's Hana Gartner, through interviews with some of Sylvestre's victims, establishes a decades-long pattern of abuse, and through documents and interviews, establishes a decades-long pattern of silence about that abuse by members of the Roman Catholic church.

In The Good Father, the fifth estate examines a story of power, abuse and a reckoning with a painful past.

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