Speaking of the…oddities of the Catholic church, there’s one order in Australia in which 70% of the bros are suspected of child abuse. Seventy percent.
Up to 200 victims have sought compensation from the St John of God order after alleging they had been abused in special schools and homes run by the brothers in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.
Last week a Melbourne inquiry into child abuse heard allegations that Brothers had drugged and pack-raped boys at their operations in Victoria.
Claims were also made that two boys had allegedly been beaten so badly they were thought to have died but their deaths had not been reported to authorities.
And Fairfax Media has obtained documents revealing that in the 1960s and 1970s dozens of boys were brutally assaulted at Kendall Grange, the order’s school for mentally and physically impaired boys at Morisset on the NSW central coast.
Michelle Mulvihill is a psychologist who was employed by the order to meet victims.
Dr Mulvihill, who is based in Sydney, worked with the order for nine years from 1998, sitting in on meetings involving negotiators from the order and 150 victims in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.
But she says she quit the job in 2007, fearing that suspected paedophile Brothers still wielded too much power in the order and were interfering with victims’ compensation and treatment.
On Sunday she described the order as hosting Brothers who were responsible for “the worst examples of child abuse I have ever heard of” and said of the 40 to 50 Brothers who had been in the order around the time she was involved, about 75 per cent had been the subject of allegations.
Another scene out of nightmares.
H/t Ian MacDougall.
Claims were also made that two boys had allegedly been beaten so badly they were thought to have died but their deaths had not been reported to authorities.
“Thought to have died?” What does this mean, exactly? Two boys are missing, but we’re still not sure they died?
Speechless.
Another scene out of nightmares.
There have been other cases where extremely lurid allegations of large-scale sexual abuse of children have turned out to be exactly that: nightmares, not actual events. I’m not saying these recent reports are false, only that we should be a little more cautious before saying they’re true. Children’s advocates have been burned by this sort of thing before.
Every time I mention the global conspiracy to rape children, people hasten to remind me of all the good the church does.
How many lost and loney people do you have to comfort to make up for A GLOBAL CONSPIRACY TO RAPE CHILDREN?
I don’t know what that number is but I rather suspect it’s a higher number than the total number of people who have ever lived.
It probably means they have testimony from other victims but the church had complete custody of the boys in question and were quite capable of simply burying them and calling it natural causes. I mean when a priest says someone died of natural causes who are the police to argue.
Yes #5 imo you’ve found the nub of this “I mean when a priest says someone died of natural causes who are the police to argue”
One rule for us, one rule for holymen…
I wouldn’t be surprised that such an order would be left with a concentration of people with bad behaviours. A cousin of mine was catholic and very keen to teach so he signed up 40+ years ago to a teaching order. He gave it up after just a year – because he couldn’t tolerate the stuff he was expected to do in the way of handing out beatings. It wasn’t the Christian Brothers (they have the worst reputation in Australia for outright violence against schoolboys) but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
The question is not about him it is who stayed? The ones who could hand out beatings as instructed. Presumably this John of God order would have lost progressively more and more brothers as those who found themselves less and less able to tolerate what was going on moved elsewhere – or all the way out of the priesthood.
“Every time I mention the global conspiracy to rape children, people hasten to remind me of all the good the church does”
It generally isn’t “the church” that does all that good – it’s individual laypeople. When did you ever hear of a pope, cardinal, bishop, monsignor, political candidate doing grunt work at a soup kitchen unless it was a for a two-minute photo-op? and whose cash is it that supports good works? The church’s? Pardon me while I express just the tiniest doubts…….would that, Spocklike, I could raise just the one eyebrow.