did priests beat nuns

From former residents of Americas Catholic orphanage system, I had heard stories about these deaths that they were not natural or even accidents, but were instead the inevitable consequence of the nuns brutality. Responding to Sally Dales story of the falling boy, Monsignor Paul Bresnehan a handsome and articulate priest who was a leading light of liberal Catholic values in Vermont told the Burlington Free Press it was just simply unbelievable. Which, for many people, it was. Here at the elevator door a girl had clutched each side of the doorway in a mad panic as two nuns behind her tugged her into the small space. Like Sally Dale, many children had claimed it was common at St. Josephs to teach the children to swim by taking them out into Lake Champlain in a rowboat and tossing them in. We sat down in a bright, airy room that opened out to a garden. As a prosecutor in Newport, Vermont, and then as a private attorney, White had devoted his career to challenging and changing the prevailing wisdom about young victims of sexual abuse. I pretended it didnt happen.. The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued. She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. In isolation, any one account could be more easily picked apart and cast into doubt. And here's where I'd like to tell you that the details may be very disturbing to some listeners. He charged that it was an open secret that many Catholic priests and some bishops, in Uganda and elsewhere, no longer live celibate chastity.. Maybe he would relax a little? It was easier for accusers in general to come forward, and easier for people to believe their stories, even if the stories sounded too awful to be true. The more people he spoke to, the starker the patterns that emerged. Then he tied a string to his penis. For the former residents of St. Josephs and for people in Albany and Kentucky and Montana who emerged from orphanages with similar stories the fight was something much more. Sister Jane of the Rosary took Sally to the little bedroom off the sewing room and made her lie facedown, dress yanked up, panties pulled down. On and on, the blows kept coming. A pinhole photograph of the chapel of the orphanage. Marie-Rose Dalpe became Sister Mary Vianney. Rob looked like his mother, who had died 18 years before of lung cancer. I have also found sisters who said Well, you have to understand their needs, and that while we only have a monthly cycle a man has a continuous cycle of sperm verbatim words from the 90s, she said. Every night before bed, he said, boys who had earned a demerit were made to pull down their pants, bend over, and grab their ankles, so they could be beaten with a footwide paddle. Except maybe for Sister James Mary. But I found a list from the Sisters of Providence that included last known addresses of women who had left. Id basically have to leave my family, find a miracle drug for my diabetes, and find a new law firm, he said later. He was 70, but he stood and moved like someone who was much younger. Dear Bill, one of the letters said, K remembers that Sister Madeline and Sister Claire slapped her head and face, pulled her hair, struck her face with the backs of their hands, so that their rings split her lips, and tripped her and knocked her down., Dear Bill To this day, C will not enter a closet if it has a hanging light., Dear Bill If L was caught not paying attention, the nuns would take a needle and regularly prick his fingertips., Dear Bill The nuns would also force G and other children to hold their arms up at their sides, with their palms up in the air, balancing a book on the palms. In the pilot episode of 1923, viewers witness Teonna ( Aminah Nieves) being repeatedly hit by a wooden ruler by Sister Mary O'Connor ( Jennifer Ehle) for failing to remember the exact procedure of . I showed Widman some videos of his plaintiffs depositions. One woman thought the nun had a whole box of them. It made supervision easier, she said. They were also, he said, a dry run for the combat of a trial, a chance to see how witnesses would present, whether they would cry, whether they seemed genuine. Widmans style was a marked contrast to Sartores. And after all that, there was no guarantee that they would win. From their perspective, their long silence was not an accident; it had been forced on them, a direct result of the abuse they had suffered. They depended on accounts that took years to emerge into public view. I couldnt find any other members of that evenings search party, either. Retired lawyer Robert Widman at his house in Burnsville, North Carolina. Rioting raged in cities around France for a fourth night despite massive police deployment, with cars and buildings set ablaze and stores looted. Before they got to the sharp drop-off, the word came down the line that the boy had been found. Mary didnt cry, however. A nun involved in a lawsuit over the Fort Worth bishop's investigation into a report that she broke her chastity vow identified the priest as Bernard Marie, from a monastery in Montana. Who had lived there? In his final meeting with the chancellor of the diocese, Barquin recalled, he and the chancellor asked their attorneys to leave the room, and with only a mediator present, they hashed out the details of the settlement. Could Sally have called up her memory of seeing the boy who fell if someone had asked her about it before the reunion? The girls, less. Priscille herself was barely older than they were. How is something so antithetical to what people understand to be the teachings of the church could be? She was with her parents, the other girl said. The Catholic Church, with their nuns and priests, are an evil / criminal organization hiding behind the Christian Religion. And if you didnt eat it, you got beat. Doctors said it was meningitis. Adams trussed the boy up and hung him from the ceiling. To one side opened a room of cupboards, their wooden shelves blanched with dust, the childrens numbers still clearly marked: 53, 19, 34, You dont try the weak claims, he said, because the weak claims ruin the strong claims.. I read the depositions of a number of former residents who, separately, described being made to kiss an old, dead man in his coffin at the orphanage. A priest, yes, she said. Through tens of thousands of pages of documents, some of them secret, as well as dozens of interviews, what I found at St. Josephs and other American orphanages was a vast and terrible matrix of corroboration. Demasure said many priests in Africa, for example, struggle with celibacy because of traditional and cultural beliefs in the importance of having children. It cost Widmans law firm dearly, and it pushed him to the edge emotionally. She told me they said they didnt want plaintiffs in the building because it would cause false beliefs and they could make up things by going through it. Walking down the long hallways and standing in the empty dorms, the woman found, brought back many vivid memories. Duplessis observed that orphanages received only half the amount for each resident that hospitals and mental institutions received. She talked about them all the time, Rob said, especially the Statue of Liberty. Did Sally think of it as abuse back when she was at the orphanage, Sartore asked? The scandal got so bad that in May, Francis summoned all Chilean bishops to Rome, where they all offered to resign en masse. I heard similar tales from Catholic orphanages in other countries, too. But I mean, overall it sucked excuse me. On the video, Sally recalls looking up to the fourth floor. One woman recalled being thrown in the lake from a boat. A man said his brother wasnt actually sexually abused by a lay worker at the orphanage, since after all the man had only attempted to touch the boys genitals but had not succeeded. Then, Widman recalled, pandemonium broke out. While it cannot alter the past, the Diocese is doing everything it can to ensure children are protected.. How many times do we have to tell you? Sister Jane of the Rosary demanded from above. The aftershocks of the orphanage reverberated through their entire lives. They would get so mad at me they would grab me wherever they could and bring me into the bathroom and put me on my back over the tub and pour cold water into my face until I would stop scream and kicking. Sally pointed out her scars for the camera. Widman found a huge metal water tank with pipes coming out of it. Has the truth surrounding his death been covered up? It ignited the same kind of angry, dismayed chaos that was engulfing Burlington. As she bent down toward the boy, the nun whispered that if Sally ran away, the same thing would happen to her. They were dangled upside down out windows, over wells, or in laundry chutes. Sally took him in through a mudroom with lots of tiny boots flung about, to a kitchen filled with the inviting smell of cooking. More than the former residents themselves knew, and more than was uncovered during the 1990s legal battle. Do you know whether she inserted her finger more than a half inch into your vagina? he asked. Sally Dales case was dismissed too. On the other hand, I think that the statement didn't help in a way because the pope did not present a plan. All the women remembered that the nun pulled out some matches. I was ordained on June 12, 1947, and I had my jubilee on June 12, 1997, and I arrived at St. Josephs Orphanage on July 31, 1953., The depositions were a chance to learn the facts. At a certain point, she said, the priest got up from his chair and forced himself on her. The narrowed focus distinguished between tortures in a way that made little sense to the people who had experienced them, and it made the stories about deaths seem more like hallucinatory one-offs than inevitable outcomes in a world of dehumanizing brutality. How did Sally remember events that she said she forgot 50 years ago? A judge dismissed another five. She had been so stoic, yet I could see his poking and prodding caused her a great deal of pain. Everyone who had passed through Ellis Island must have seen it the day they arrived, beautiful and grand, holding out the promise of freedom and possibility. She had a huge bump coming up on her forehead and big, dark bruises around her eyes. But Sally was still there to see what happened next: The nun reached through the window frame and shoved Patty hard. At one meeting, a woman was shouted down when she suggested that they all contact the bishop together. Could you spare it? Sally figured the boy fell from the window in 1944 or so, because she was moving to the big girls dormitory that day. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. And if you guys really if you knew anything about it, if you have kids that were there, or if you had any relatives that were there, you wouldnt be on that side of the table right now. A little black baby was coming out. If anyone has been hurt by any church official in anyway, he wrote, I am heartily sorry.. Mainly she has an abortion. Here was Sally herself with Sister Peter, the mother superior, and Bishop Brady. She recalled exactly how she and the priest were seated in two armchairs face-to-face in the university classroom, her eyes cast to the floor. The diocese reached out to one former resident, whom they believed would testify for them, and flew her in from Utah for a tour. Lurching past the nun, Sally grabbed that ankle and an arm as Patty crashed hard up against the brick wall on her left. The process could take a year. They were moved around inside the orphanage as well. The children had to walk in a long way before the water reached their waists. The few times that orphanage abuse cases have been litigated in the US, the courts have remained, with a few exceptions, generally indifferent. Specific details diverged, but the storys center held. Yes, he conceded, she said she told a social worker about the seminarians who molested her at the lake, but there were no records to show that her complaint was passed on to anyone who had the authority to investigate it. Pressing Sally for facts one minute, he would pivot and ask her to speculate on strange, impossible questions about the nature of time and the workings of memory, before pulling back and lightening up, pausing a beat, then circling back around to prod and probe. I saw a sister come into the girls small dorm and she came over to my bed and told me to come with her. One of the heart-rending storylines of Paramount+'s Western series '1923' revolves around Teonna Rainwater, a Native American girl who gets tortured in a Catholic boarding school. Before 1980, White told me, social services typically steered child abuse victims away from court, because the process was thought to be too traumatic for the children and the cases were too hard to prove. Her house was full of cheery little knickknacks, like small china animals, but everything was always exactly where it was supposed to be. A few weeks ago at a major meeting in Waterford City at which I was the speaker, I was asked, "Why were Irish Nuns so cruel?" At the time I didn't have a ready response, so I answered that I wanted to reflect on the question for some time before I would reply. They spoke about lit matches being held against skin. Its depressing., Of all of the plaintiffs, Sally occupied a special place in his memory. Widman and Morris deposed about 20 nuns. If he had any doubts, it was clear he would not share them. In sex abuse cases across the United States, defense lawyers had started to challenge recovered memories. Sally had been taken out in that boat too, as had many other children, and she knew what came next: The nuns threw you in the water. she thought. They had to put their hands together, as in prayer, and rest their head on them, then stay like that all through the night. Sally explained many times that she didnt think her memories had ever been entirely lost, but maybe they were hidden. She was about to move apartments, she said. And various men moved in and out of the drama: priests, seminarians, counselors, and others, recurring characters who kept their given names and who would appear for a time, then step back offstage and into the rest of the world. Yes. It happened at a power station after Millette crawled under a high tension wire and made contact through metal helmet.. But the boy in the boat was screaming. Then, and in subsequent conversations, she told him about the little boy who was thrown out of a fourth-story window by a nun. A number of women separately told Widman they remembered a day when they were gathered together to witness a punishment. it for a long time, I was in St. Francis Home for Boys in Detroit, Mich. 1963-1965, 7th and 8th grade. It was she. The stories haunted me, but despite the many resonances with tales from different orphanages, I found some of them just too much to believe. Twice, Sally watched them rub onions in Marys eyes. The woman said that she remembered what the nun had done to everyone, and that she had done it to her too. Around three years after Joseph Barquins suit was first filed, the diocese agreed to resolve it through mediation rather than a trial in open court. In the cold winter light, the basement dining room, once an optimistic yellow, had an uneasy green tinge. Still, the list of victims was growing, and so was the list of abusers. She couldnt fight the battle alone. Scattered through the witness depositions, the stories were hard to piece together: How many deaths were claimed? He would hug me, and I really got frightened. After the case was settled, Widman headed back to Florida, where he started taking on pro bono adoption cases and taught an ethics class at the University of Florida law school. US bishops, we now know, had been swapping pedophile priests among parishes and across state lines for decades, and they could do the math. So in a journey that lasted four years, I went around the country, and even around the world, in search of the truth about this vast, unnarrated chapter of American experience.
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