Canada: priest pleads guilty to 47 counts against girls across four decades of parishes
Request a correction or replyRecord class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
parish priest, Diocese of London
Organization
Diocese of London (Ontario)
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Forty-seven girls across four decades of parishes — each inside the ordinary pastoral relationship of priest and child parishioner, transferred parish to parish.
- Pastoral or clerical authority
Evidence structure
Proceedings
2006-10-01 · guilty plea and sentence
Ontario courts, Canada. Fr Charles Sylvestre pleaded guilty to 47 counts of indecent and sexual assault against girls aged 9 to 14 across parishes in Belle River, Windsor, London, Sarnia and Chatham-Kent between 1952 and 1989 — described by the Crown as the largest known non-residential-school clergy abuse case in North America at the time. Sentenced to three years, he died in custody in January 2007.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- pastoral authority over girls aged 9–14 across successive parishes, 1952–1989
Cited record
Sources
- national public broadcaster verdict and sentencing report CBC News, 'Retired Ontario priest pleads guilty to 47 sex charges' (2006).
Reports the plea, the span of parishes, and the sentence.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/retired-ontario-priest-pleads-guilty-to-47-sex-charges-1.616584 Corpus classification: national-public-broadcaster; evidentiary role: verdict-and-sentencing-report.
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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