(Montreal) A congregation of Catholic brothers that once ran up to 80 schools in Quebec is facing a class action lawsuit over alleged sexual assaults committed over decades, according to court documents released Friday.
More than 87 people claim to have been victims of the Brothers of Christian Instruction in more than 20 schools in the province.
The documents state that the congregation was aware of its members’ sexual abuse of children, but “preferred to relocate and protect the abusers rather than help the victims.”
Most of the events took place between the 1950s and 1970s, Mr.e Antoine Duranleau-Hendrickx, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that most of the attackers are now dead.
The representative of the group of victims, a 76-year-old man whose identity is protected by the courts, says he was sexually assaulted twice by Brother Charles on the grounds of the Sainte-Bernadette-Soubirous school in Montreal in 1960, when he was about 13 years old.
The latter was responsible for the students and allegedly abused the victim’s trust by attempting to touch her in class.
Later, during a singing lesson, the brother allegedly forced the victim to touch his genitals while he rubbed himself against her, according to court documents.
Another victim, among the 30 who agreed to testify, recounts having suffered repeated sexual assaults for two years by Brother Adrias, who ran another school in Montreal. He allegedly assaulted the victim in his office one to three times a week between 1961 and 1963, the testimony indicates.
The Brothers of Christian Instruction did not respond to AFP’s requests.
Another class action, launched in 2022, brings together 147 people who say they were “sexually assaulted by more than a hundred priests or members of the diocese staff, some of whom had several victims or were part of the senior clergy of Quebec.”
The influential Canadian cardinal Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, 66-year-old archbishop of Quebec and member of the Pope’s advisory council, is suspected of sexually assaulting a minor in the late 1980s.
Denying the accusations, he returned to office in July after the Vatican closed an investigation into him that failed to “identify any acts of misconduct or abuse on the part of the cardinal.”