Saturday, January 2, 2010

Canada: Priests, Porn and Child Abuse

The arrest on Dec 8 of the Rev Robin Barrett, rector of St John’s Anglican Church in Goulds, Newfoundland, is the second recent high-profile arrest of a clergyman in Canada for possession of child pornography.

On Sept 25 Ottawa police charged Roman Catholic Bishop Raymond Lahey with possessing and importing child pornography. Bishop Lahey, who resigned as Bishop of Antigonish in Nova Scotia shortly before his arrest, allegedly brought a laptop home to Canada that contained images the Canadian Border Services found of “concern” during a customs inspection.

The laptop was confiscated and after a forensic analysis the Catholic bishop was charged with possession of child pornography.

Fr Barrett was arrested after detectives in Toronto, posing as paedophiles on an internet chat room, struck up an on-line relationship with the priest, and allegedly received pornographic images from him. “I can tell you that they are images that involve, basically, sexual activity, and it involves infants and babies. This person had what I would consider a fairly large collection, however the age of the [people in the] collection really concerns us,” Detective Paul Krawczyk told the Toronto Globe & Mail.

 
Read it all here.

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