Franco-Canadian priest Joannes Rivoire, accused of sexual assault on young Inuit in the far North of Canada in the 1960s, has died in France. The nonagenarian, who lived near Lyon, was ultimately never worried despite several extradition requests from Canada.
The Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), which has 3,700 missionaries around the world, has always explained that it was only informed in 2013 of the existence of the first arrest warrant issued against him... in 1998 in Canada. This priest, who left Canada in 1993 after 33 years in the field, was targeted since 2022 by a new Canadian arrest warrant for having sexually assaulted a child in the Canadian Arctic between January 1974 and December 1979. But, in October 2022, France had rejected the extradition request to Canada, explaining that It was a complex case and that it did not extradite its citizens. Even the congregation's exclusion procedures, targeting the French religious, failed. The one who was seen, particularly in Canada, as the symbol of the impunity of sexual attackers within the Catholic Church, “died Thursday after a long illness”