Ghosts of the Orphanage

Please read the linked article with discernment and caution, keeping in mind that several of the testimonies are contradictory. It is about several Catholic orphanages in North America, and one in particular, where children were allegedly abused, and even murdered. In days when corporal punishment at home and at school was routine, what the children from the orphanage describe is torture. The young lady who wrote the article appears to have done some genuine investigative journalism. At one point in my life I might have dismissed it all as an evil fantasy. But now I know more and have read more. Throughout the history of the Church, particularly in times of prosperity, persons with serious emotional or mental problems have used the external structures and trappings of the Catholic religion to hide or shield criminal behaviors. Sadly, in some cases, persons of authority neglected their duty. Similarly, certain congregations for woman religious have, since the Middle Ages and even before, been used as places to dump women and girls who were unmarriageable or unmanageable, whether or not they had true vocations to be brides of Christ. Some women who became nuns in the past entered to escape abusive home lives, or potentially abusive marriages. But in various cases it seems they brought the dysfunction of their homes to the convent. It is the reason why orders such as the Carmelites have always been deliberately strict about who entered the cloister. It is also the reason the process for discerning genuine vocations was reformed and lengthened by the Second Vatican Council. And remember, the people who committed the alleged crimes in the article had access to the sublimity of the traditional Latin liturgy. Obviously, there was something seriously missing in their formation. But as we now know, neither the priestly life nor the religious life, nor even the married state, are meant to be remedies for intrinsically disordered tendencies, mental illnesses and emotional disturbances. Otherwise the results are disastrous for all. From BuzzFeed:

Sally figured the boy fell from the window in 1944 or so, because she was moving to the “big girls” dormitory that day. Girls usually moved when they were 6, though residents of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, did not always have a clear sense of their age — birthdays, like siblings and even names, being one of the many human attributes that were stripped from them when they passed through its doors. She recounted his fall in a deposition on Nov. 6, 1996, as part of a remarkable group of lawsuits that 28 former residents brought against the nuns, the diocese, and the social agency that oversaw the orphanage.

I watched the deposition — all 19 hours of grainy, scratchy videotape — more than two decades later. By that time sexual abuse scandals had ripped through the Catholic Church, shattering the silence that had for so long protected its secrets. 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. Even if they had happened decades ago, when the accusers were only children. Even if the people they were accusing were pillars of the community. (Read more.)

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