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“I need to tell you something,” he began. The story poured out over the next two hours.

“The anguish and the fear of having to hold that in for all those years was something I had never, ever seen: I had never seen him like that,” his widow said in an interview.

Her husband, she said, was not afraid of death but of the possibility of an afterlife in which he would have to explain to God why he had disavowed his faith.

“He was terrified, absolutely terrified,” she said. “That, for me, was heart-wrenching.”

Doe, a father of three who worked most of his life for a cleaning company, died two days after that conversation.

“I think until the day he died, he was ashamed,” she said. “He was terrified about what people would think of him.”

Doe’s widow said she launched the lawsuit on his behalf to gain recognition for his suffering: “I think it gives a sense of meaning for what he went through. I think he told me for a reason: because he wanted, at some point, for the church to be responsible.”

Under Ontario law, an estate’s executor has as long as two years to launch a lawsuit on behalf of a deceased person. There’s no provision that limits when a victim of sexual assault can sue for damages.

Lawyer Robert Talach, who has litigated more clergy sex abuse cases than anyone in the country, called it a first-of-its-kind lawsuit.

“I don’t know of any case like it,” said Talach, who represents John Doe’s estate.

The Doe case is one of four new lawsuits launched against the Catholic diocese in the three months since the Citizen published its series about clergy sexual abuse.