Chatham author’s first novel delves into child sexual abuse by clergy

It’s been nearly two decades since news came to light about young girls being sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest while serving at churches in Southwestern Ontario and the cover-up by the church, but Renée D. Bondy hasn’t forgotten about it.

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The Chatham woman’s first novel [non]disclosure, published by Second Story Press, tells the story of a young girl who was abused by a Catholic priest. Like many victims, she kept a dark secret for years before finding her voice.

When asked about the decision to write [non]disclosure, Bondy recalled writing articles for a Toronto Catholic newspaper on the trial of the late Fr. Charles Sylvestre, who pleaded guilty in a Chatham courtroom in 2006 to 47 charges of indecent assault, which occurred between 1954 and 1986 involving girls aged eight to 14 .

“I just kept thinking about it over the years,” Bondy said. “I always thought, ‘Oh, there’s so much more to say about this.’”

Being a Chatham resident, Bondy said she had a pretty good sense of how the Sylvestre case affected the community.

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“So, that really stayed with me.”

But, Bondy was teaching at the University of Windsor and life got busy and she went on with life.

However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she said, “There were a lot of quiet hours during the pandemic for some of us” and she started thinking about the issue again.

Noting the disgraced priest is not named in the novel, Bondy said the story was inspired by the Sylvestre case and other cases of sexual abuse by clergy she has read about over the years.

The narrator in the novel is also not named.

Bondy said much of the book is set in the 1970s and 80s as the narrator lives with the secret of being abused until early adulthood when she becomes involved in a criminal case against the priest that abused her.

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Woven into the narrator’s story is how she works in an underground hospice for men dying from HIV/AIDS in 1980s.

“I knew she needed to find a community of people,” Bondy said. “I knew that she wasn’t going to begin healing just all on her own.”

Bondy said that’s how the narrator begins to find support from people who hear and believe her story and support her in her journey.

“There are similarities between the kind of silencing that was imposed on victims in sexual cases within the church and the kind of silencing that was imposed particularly in the 80s on gay men with HIV/AIDS,” she said.

“There’s a lot to be said, I think, about what we disclose and what we don’t disclose and why. How secrets can be protective and we can chose to keep secrets that protect us, and we can also have secrets imposed on us and be silenced and how that can be really damaging.”

Bondy says she is not a victim of abuse and doesn’t speak from a personal perspective, but her novel is “not an easy read.”

“My hope is it encourages empathy for victims (and) that it encourages people to really think about the effects of such cases on a community,” she says.

She also hopes people see the narrator “is finding a way to move forward with her life.”

The book launch for [non]disclosure is Thursday, Nov. 7 at Turns and Tales Board Game Café, 213 King. W., in downtown Chatham at 7 p.m.

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