Neither the international arrest warrants issued against him, nor the efforts of his hierarchy, that of the religious order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to which he belonged, urging him to place himself at the disposal of justice so that he answers ” in truth “ the accusations of sexual assault to which he was the subject, nor the incessant fight of the families of the alleged victims, of the Inuit of Nunavut, this Canadian territory where the priest officiated for more than three decades, will have succeeded in convincing Father Joannes Rivoire to come and explain and defend himself before Canadian justice. He died in Lyon on Thursday April 11, thirty years after leaving Canada, thirty years after the first complaints were filed against him.
“We are aware that this news will be a blow to many people, particularly the survivors and their families who campaigned for him to be brought to justice in Canada,” declared the spokesperson for the Congregation of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate of Canada, Ken Thorson.
On the very rare occasions when he agreed to speak, Joannes Rivoire never stopped proclaiming his innocence. “I have nothing to do with it,” he repeated to World on December 9, 2021, during an interview organized in the Lyon nursing home where he was retiring. At the question “Are you at peace with yourself? » the old priest replied: “Who has nothing to reproach themselves for? We are all sinners. My life is almost over, I’m getting ready to move on to the other side. I am at peace with God who, I hope, will offer me paradise. » A few months later, on September 14, 2022, in front of a delegation of Inuit whom he had agreed to meet at the headquarters of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, on Fourvière Hill, the epicenter of Lyon Catholicism, the religious had again denied blocked all the facts with which he was accused, and reiterated his refusal to return to Canada to explain himself to the police.
Rushed return to France
Father Joannes Rivoire, originally from Lyon, was barely 30 years old when he arrived in 1960 in Chesterfield Inlet, a hamlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay in the Canadian Far North. A tundra landscape located beyond the Arctic Circle, covered in snow nine months of the year, where people still hunted whales, seals and caribou. Through their contact, the young priest learned Inuktitut, the Inuit language, taught catechism and French, celebrated masses or funerals for parishioners scattered in localities several hundred kilometers apart, in Naujaat, renamed by the settlers Repulse Bay, Arviat or even Igloulik.
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