The Cassock and the Crown: Canada's Most Controversial Murder Trial

"L'affaire Delorme", which was what the Quebec press called the lengthy prosecution of a Roman Catholic priest for the murder of his half-brother, is still referred to as Canada's most controversial homicide case. Its author, Jean Monet, is the grandson of Dominique Monet, the presiding judge at one of the trials. In January 1922, the body of Raoul Delorme was found in his Montreal residence. He'd been shot several times. Universal shock was immense when his half-brother, Father Adélard Delorme, was arrested for the crime. The priesthood and murder were so incompatible in the mind of the public, particularly its Catholic population, that even the press voiced a certain amount of disbelief. The circumstantial evidence against Father Delorme, however, was too damning: he'd recently taken out a life insurance policy on his brother, bloodstains were found in his car, and during one of the earliest known examples of ballistics testing, the police matched the bullets extracted from Raoul Delorme's body to a gun that the priest had purchased only days before the murder. Anyone else would have been convicted after a speedy trial and executed, but the Roman Catholic church was a powerful force in 1920s Quebec. Allowing a priest to be punished for fratricide would have been a fatal blow to its omnipotence, so the Catholic judiciary readily accepted the insanity plea presented by Delorme's lawyers and ruled that he was unfit to stand trial. A year later, the superintendent of the hospital to which he had been committed asserted that the priest exhibited no sign of dementia, and the case was re-opened. Two high-profile murder trials ensued, but the jury in each instance was unable to agree. The case was finally closed, and Adélard Delorme was declared a free man in the fall of 1924. Based on trial transcripts, archival research, and interviews with those who were connected to the event, "The Cassock and the Crown" is a fascinating and daunting look at a murder case that was tried in a religious climate blindly favourable to a villainous priest. The Delorme affair should be held up as an example of what happens when church and state are not rigidly separated.