The Quebec Superior Court authorized a collective action on Wednesday against the diocese of Gaspé for gestures committed by alleged aggressive priests.
“This is excellent news,” says Marc Bellemare, one of the lawyers on the file.
In his decision, judge Damien St-Onge therefore leaning in favor of a group represented by Bellemare Lawyers and Lambert Avocats, based respectively in Quebec and Montreal.
If the Court decides in favor of the appeal during the trial to come, “all persons, as well as their heirs and beneficiaries, having been sexually assaulted” by a member of the clergy or a secular attendant of the diocese of Gaspé between May 5, 1922 and the judgment could be eligible for reparations within the framework of this collective action.
The applicant therefore hopes that the Roman Catholic episcopal corporation of Gaspé and the Roman Catholic bishop of Gaspé will be ordered to pay each of the applicants an “amount to be determined” as pecuniary, non -pecuniary and punitive damages following legal proceedings.
“Now it is important that the victims assert themselves and come to meet us as part of a completely confidential process,” explains Mr.e Bellemare.
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He believes that, if they had caused, participants in the collective appeal could receive between $ 100,000 and $ 250,000 each, if other judgments were reached which have recently been rendered in this area in Quebec.
Hundreds of cases
The lawyer who is also behind the collective action of the Diocese of Quebec says that the recourse of Gaspé could reach hundreds of people, as is a huge territory and a period of several decades.
“It understands the whole Gaspé peninsula. There are currently about thirty members, but it is called upon to increase rapidly. ”
Me Bellemare also underlines that it is more difficult to convince men to participate in this type of repair approach.
“There may be shame. Others say to themselves that it will pass with the flow of time, but this kind of injury never really disappears. ”
Multiple attacks
The two applicants appointed to the file, Beaudoin Francoeur and Marc-Alain Marticotte, two men, will act as representatives of the members of the collective action.
Mr. Francoeur would have been five years old when the attacks began in the 1950s. During visits to the house, he alleged that Father Alphonse Ancil took him apart and abused him in the family residence.
The attacks would have continued for five years at a “frequency of approximately once a week”, according to the document presenting the collective action.
For his part, Mr. Marticotte maintains having been the victim of abuse from the age of eight from Father Wilfrid Provencher when he was a choir child around 1966.
In both cases, the diocese of Gaspé would not have “taken preventive measures to protect the applicant and other children from abuse from [ses] members ”.
Pending in Rimouski and Rouyn
Like the diocese of Gaspé, those of Rimouski and Timmins, in Ontario (now diocese of Rouyn-Noranda in 1973), were targeted in June 2024 by a collective action in connection with sexual gestures alleged against several of their members.
Also defended by Bellemare and Lambert firms, the other two collective actions have not been authorized for the moment.