Canadian police issue arrest warrant for accused priest

AFP- Ottawa – Canadian police said they have issued a new arrest warrant for a priest accused of sexually abusing an Inuit boy in the country’s far north several decades ago before fleeing to France.

Johannes Rivoire, 93, came into the spotlight again this week when an Inuit delegation at the Vatican asked Pope Francis to personally intervene in the case, which has been unsolved for nearly 30 years.

Rivoire, a priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, spent three decades in Canada’s far north, before returning to France in 1993. He now lives in Lyon.

Canadian police had tried to arrest him in the 1990s on at least three other counts of sexual abuse in the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Rankin Inlet and Naujaat.

According to Canadian media, the charges were eventually dropped when prosecutors deemed it unlikely that France would extradite him.

Natan Obed, president of the Tapiriit Kanatami Inuit, told a news conference Monday that he “raised the legacy of sexual abuse in the church and asked the Pope if he would intervene directly” in the Rivoire case.

The 32-member indigenous Inuit and Métis delegation was invited to meet the Pope over recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at church-run

boarding schools in Canada, attended by indigenous children as part of a government policy of assimilation. forced.

Many of the children were physically and sexually abused by principals and teachers, and thousands are believed to have died from disease, malnutrition, or neglect.