In a moment of truth and clarity, Archbishop Anthony Mancini once summed
up the shock he has shared with most Catholics over the last 30 years
as a feeling of “shame and frustration, fear and disappointment, along
with a sense of vulnerability and a tremendous poverty of spirit.”
Halifax’s plain-spoken bishop spoke those words in 2009 when he was
faced with a hydra’s head of media microphones asking how he reacted to
news that Antigonish Bishop Raymond Lahey had been stopped at the border
with a trove of child-porn images and videos on his laptop.