[WARNING: Very disturbing sexual content]

Pope Benedict’s recent apology to the Australian victims of rapists-in-roman collars came as somewhat of a surprise to me because, until last week, I had (naively) assumed that the worst of the abuse had occurred in America and Ireland.  (And, to a lesser degree, Canada)

As someone who prides himself in possessing a very high shock threshold, l was completely unprepared for the shock that awaited me as I began to dig into the problems down under.

The background: Until just after the Second World War, the British Government had a policy of shipping many of its undesirable youth to the far corners of the Empire.  By XXIst Century standards, it seems barbaric but, at the time, it was assumed to be in the children’s best interest.

Vagrant, illegitimate boys on the streets of London or Liverpool were doomed to a life of sub-human existence.  If the kids were removed from the squalor of the inner city and set up in a farm school in the wilds of Australia, they would — or so the thinking went — be given a fighting chance to overcome their desperate circumstances.

The Child Migrants (as they’ve come to be known) were sent to Australia and (generally) segregated according to religion. The Protestant kids went to church and state run facilities and the Catholic kids  — in many cases, the illegitimate offspring of Irish immigrants — were handed over to the Religious Orders. The girls went to the Sisters of Mercy and the boys went to the Christian Brothers.

In the late 1990s, both the UK and Australian Governments held hearings on the subject of Child Migration and what they uncovered relative to the Christian Brothers could make any grown man cry.

I speak from personal experience because when I read the following in the (British) House of Commons report I cried for the first time in my adult life:

It is hard to convey the sheer weight of the testimony we have received. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that some of what was done there was of a quite exceptional depravity, so that terms like ‘sexual abuse’ are too weak to convey it. For example, those of us who heard the account of a man who as a boy was a particular favourite of some Christian Brothers at Tardun who competed as to who could rape him 100 times first, his account of being in terrible pain, bleeding and bewildered, trying to beat his own eyes so they would cease to be blue as the Brothers liked his blue eyes, or being forced to masturbate animals, or being held upside down over a well and threatened in case he ever told, will never forget it.

That’s the British House of Commons not the National Inquirer.  What happened to those kids was an organized, pervasive, systematic, decades-long ordeal of rape, torture and abuse perpetrated by Catholic Religious.

Documentation [.pdf] provided to the Australian Senate adds:

4.2 The accounts of sexual abuse and assault at these four institutions are horrendous, supporting and amplifying the UK Committee’s description of ‘quite exceptional depravity’. The stories from the ex-residents of Bindoon, Castledare, Clontarf, and Tardun [all in Western Australia] provide an account of systemic criminal sexual assault and predatory behaviour by a large number of the Brothers over a considerable period of time. Evidence was given of boys being abused in many ways for the sexual gratification of the Brothers, of boys being terrified in bed at night as Brothers stalked the dormitories to come and take children to their rooms, of boys as ‘pets’ of the Brothers being repeatedly sodomised, and of boys being pressured into bestial acts.

This information came to light during the reign of John Paul II.  At the time (mid to late 1990s) he was still in good health – yet he failed to act.

Ironically, the pope that apologized for the sins of many of his long dead predecessors uttered not one word of sorrow and took no responsibility for his own myriad failures.

I could live to be 100 years old and I’ll never get that image of a battered child beating his own eyes to change their color out of my mind…

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Maybe the justice sought was ultimately delivered by the hand of God because the Australian Province of the once great (Irish) Christian Brothers has been reduced to this:

Deo Gratias!