Companions ensure evil will not prevail
National Post, 25 May 2025
Robert Poulin was a desperately lonely teenager who sought friends, or perhaps just companions, in the wrong places, desperately wrong places
Last week I was on retreat with brother priests at St. Augustine’s Seminary, perched atop the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto.
The largest class of priests that St. Augustine’s ever produced was in 1955. Most, if not all, of those men, are now dead, some buried at St. Augustine’s. Many served Jesus and the Church for decades. Others, in the turbulence which descended upon the Church and the world in the 1960s and 1970s, left the ministry.
Father Robert Joseph Bedard was part of the Class of 1955. A priest of Ottawa, he went to his eternal reward in 2011. He was known to all as “Father Bob” — incidentally, what most people called Pope Leo XIV most of his priestly life.
He lived a great Canadian life, and 2025 marks three significant anniversaries. It’s the seventieth of his ordination, the fiftieth of his darkest day, and the fortieth of his founding of a new Canadian religious order — Companions of the Cross.
Like many priests of his vintage, Fr. Bob spent the good part of his first twenty years of priesthood teaching in a Catholic high school, St. Pius X in Ottawa. On Monday afternoon, Oct. 27, 1975, he was teaching a religion class of nearly 80 students. He was telling them not to be discouraged by the manifold problems in the world; Jesus had long ago conquered sin and death. The gospel truths remained true; the gift of salvation was still being offered.
At about 2:20 p.m., the door to the classroom opened. The barrel of a sawed-off shotgun appeared first, then afterward Robert Poulin, 18, a student in the class. He opened fire on his classmates, killing Mark Hough and wounding five others. Poulin then retreated to the corridor, turning the gun on himself. When Fr. Bob made it to the corridor, he had to recognize what was left of the shooter’s face.
Earlier that morning, Poulin had lured neighbour Kim Rabot, 17, to his home. He raped her and then stabbed her to death. Before he left for the school, he set his house on fire. Sorting through Poulin’s effects, investigators found a massive storehouse of pornography and an inflatable female doll. In his basement room he would spend endless hours playing “wargames” with friends, living then as a great number of young men live digitally today.
The shooting was 24 years before Columbine, before mass shootings in the United States became a routine part of their culture. It was only the second school shooting in Canadian history.
Christopher Cobb and Bob Avery, two Ottawa journalists, wrote a little book about it all, carrying the disturbing title, “Rape of a Normal Mind.” The opening line tried to capture how incongruous all of this was in a sleepy “government town”: “Nothing much ever happens in the quiet affluent life of Ottawa, or so they say.”
What happened that day to his students would remain with Fr. Bob for decades to come; those closest to him would later detect the roots of what would produce, much later, a temporary breakdown, what we might now call PTSD.
“Evil will not prevail,” said that other Father Bob, Pope Leo XIV, at that first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s.
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