OTTAWA – A former head chaplain with the Canadian Forces has been charged with buggery, sexual assault and gross indecency in an 1972 attack, dealing the military its second blow in as many weeks.

Roger Bazin was a Roman Catholic chaplain at CFB Borden and a young man in the early stages of his career when the incident is alleged to have occurred. He rose through the ranks of the military to become a brigadier-general with command of all Catholic chaplains in the force.

“He was a very, very nice man. Very congenial, gracious. Lots of sensitivity to people as a chaplain general. Very positive, so this really comes as a shock to us,” said Bishop Donald Theriault, head of the Roman Catholic Military Diocese of Canada.

“This was right at the beginning of his career … so to reconcile any of that, it just doesn’t fit yet, you know?”

The allegations that Bazin assaulted a male victim while serving as a captain in the military come one week after Col. Russell Williams was removed from command at CFB Trenton and charged with the murders of two women and the sexual assault of two others.

Brig.-Gen. David Kettle, the force’s current chaplain general, served in the Protestant chaplaincy stream before Bazin engineered the unification of all military chaplains ahead of his retirement in 1995. Kettle said in an interview that all chaplains hold positions of trust in the military community and alleged violations of that confidence are unacceptable.

“Our concern is always for the victim. It’s part of what a chaplain is. He’s the guy that always sticks up for the underdog or those who are afflicted.”

Still, Bazin appeared to be an upstanding officer and military leader.

“What I saw I liked,” said Kettle. “He was splendidly bilingual. He was a sophisticated and brilliant man.”

Screening procedures for military chaplains have become much more rigorous, particularly since the 1990s when the Catholic and Protestant chaplaincy streams were transformed into a multifaith service to accommodate Jews, Muslims and other religions.

Chaplain candidates must now pass through a religious screening process, military testing and an interfaith committee before being awarded the position. Once in the force there are regular performance reviews and a strict code of ethics that chaplains must follow.

But all accounts suggest Bazin would have passed the modern tests. There are glowing reports in local newspapers from northern Ontario of Bazin as a parish priest. He even served as a representative of the Diocese of Thunder Bay for a time after he left the force in 1995.

In 2002, he survived a brutal car crash with a broken back. He was pulled from his vehicle in the ditch of a rural road near his childhood home of St. Claude, Mb. moments before it turned into a flaming wreck. A year later he was back at the altar.

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“Being the wonderful, kind, considerate man he is,” the Kenora Daily Miner and News wrote in June 2003, “Bazin located his monsignor’s robes and was back amongst his people once again…”