Montreal’s Catholic Church will fingerprint priests who work with children

In an attempt to protect young and vulnerable parishioners from abuse, the Catholic Church of Montreal will start fingerprinting all priests before they work with children.

New rules announced this week will require priests to provide digital fingerprints, and expands on a pilot project called “Responsible Pastoral Ministry” launched within 10 churches in the city last year that imposed screening processes for those working and volunteering within the diocese. All churches in the jurisdiction will have to follow these rules, which prohibits an adult from being alone with children, by 2020.

“If someone would like to do something wrong or abuse anyone, knowing there’s all this filtering, they won’t ask to become volunteers in our church,” Bertrand Montpetit, a pastor at a church in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, told reporters.

It’s all a response to allegations of rampant sexual abuse of children at the hands of Catholic priests in Montreal — and around the world.

In March, a 55-year-old Montreal priest was charged with multiple accounts of sexual assault and touching of three children. Father Brian Boucher was very involved with activities at the church, including assisting youth during confirmations and first communions. The Archdiocese of Montreal denounced any violence within the church.

In 2013, a Quebec court agreed on an $18 million settlement to be paid by the province’s Catholic Church to hundreds of victims of sexual abuse that occurred for decades within the organization.

The Archbishop of Montreal announced his plan to clamp down on the potential for violence within the church in 2016, and has been encouraging other victims to come forward.

However, the Quebec’s Association of Victims of Priests has criticized the efforts as weak.

“This is damage control. The church has suffered a lot of flak because of its inaction about pedophile priests,” spokesperson Carlo Tarini told reporters last year. “It needs to do an awful lot more.”

In 2014, Pope Francis created commission to advise him on how to eradicate sexual abuse within the Catholic Church worldwide, and to also deal with widespread coverups of violence among bishops and other church leaders. In March, a member of the panel quit after raising concerns about its effectiveness.

“There are still men at that level in the church who would resist or hinder work to protect children in 2017, it’s just not acceptable,” Marie Collins, herself a survivor of abuse at the hands of priests in Ireland, told the CBC.

Collins is the second member of the commission to quit after another survivor Peter Saunders resigned last February over concerns that church hierarchy would not be held accountable for its actions.