Clearly the Vatican does not wish to believe modern nuns can be abusive. Indeed it was this thought that prompted New England RC psychology graduate, Ashley Hill, to set about the difficult task of collecting evidence which she has now published in her Habits of Sin An Expose of Nuns Who Sexually Abuse Children and Each Other. The research was prompted by her own childhood experiences.She began by placing advertisements in the papers for victims to come forward, and then set up an abuse by nuns network, which concentrated on sexual abuse but also frequently revealed physical abuse. This topic had never been scientifically investigated before.
Ashley Hill said that “during her research she heard from people claiming to be victims of sexually abusive nuns in 24 states, as well as in Ireland, Canada and Australia. She has corresponded with more than 40 victims who said nuns sexually abused them. Six of those cases involved male victims.”
She prints verbatim some of the many harrowing letters she received from former Convent school children. Sometimes the abuse would be by proxy, the nuns facilitating the lewd activities of visiting priests by failing to intervene. Worse still, some nuns actively co operated with paedophile priests. Sometimes nuns would combine sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in one unspeakable act by telling the little girl how wicked she was to have engaged in such indecent behaviour, berating her with terrible guilt inducing biblical quotations, and culminating in physical punishment.
Horrific letters
Most of these children, now in adulthood, were in dire psychological states due to past memories and through trying to rationalise their continuance in the Roman Catholic Church. Ruined marriages, careers and businesses, and years spent in getting counselling and psychotherapy, were the norm. Surely only the True Gospel can bring effectual “healing of the memories”. One would advise readers against reading these horrific letters for themselves, and even Ashley Hill in the end had to quit her Abuse Network.
As a by product of this research, she discovered the ubiquitous lesbianism cynically conducted amongst many nuns, who, far from sacrificing their lives for the cause of Christ and the Church, had set out deliberately to find an all female environment.
Turning plight into cash
Mother Teresa was not the first abusive nun to turn her victim’s plight into cash. During the 16 year premiership of Quebec of ardent Romanist Maurice Duplessis, which ended in 1959, the Roman Catholic Church was outrageously favoured. The Grey Nuns were amongst the recipients. On 10th February 2000 the Los Angeles Times carried an expose of their activities under the headline ‘Duplessis Orphans’.
According to the article, “Herve Bertrand remembers the day when his life at a Quebec orphanage turned inside out. On March 18, 1954, the nuns came in and said, “From today, you are all crazy”. Everyone started to cry, even the nuns. Then everything changed: our lessons stopped, and work they called it therapy began. I saw the bars go on the windows, the fences go up around the compound. I saw the buses pull up full of psychiatric patients, our new room mates. It was like a prison. And that’s where I spent a quarter of my life”
Re classified as mental
Duplessis had allowed the Grey Nuns more than three times the daily allowance for a mentally retarded child that they received for a normal one. The hard headed nuns saw their chance and simply recategorised on paper thousands of normal orphans to claim the enhanced capitation. The article states that “in order that the children would qualify, their medical records were altered to declare them mentally unstable or retarded”. Alice Quinton, aged 62 in 2000, described her “dark memory of cells, tranquillisers and straitjackets. She says she was punished for asking questions, for wetting her bed; for not doing her work fast enough. She asked, ‘Why am I here?’ No one ever had an answer. I thought to myself: ‘Am I going crazy? Am I going to grow up to be like these mental patients?’” And what was Alice’s mental illness? She had been born of an incestuous relationship and had been committed as a “Cause of Scandal”.
A trickle becomes a torrent
“Today,” the article runs, “Quinton carries a binder of grievances, a catalogue of injustice. She opens it to show an architectural diagram ... of her ward and the location of the bed where she says she was strapped in a straitjacket on the cold metal springs for three weeks. She presents childlike drawings of ‘the humiliation chair’, depicting a girl in a straitjacket strapped onto a potty chair, with a gag in her mouth and tears springing from her eyes in dotted lines. The detail is precise, down to the number of fasteners on the straitjacket. As clear, in Quinton’s mind, is the memory of a nun’s knee in her back, lacing her into the jacket as if into an old corset. “None of it made sense,” she says, her eyes brimming. “But I never thought I was insane. I never believed I was retarded.”
Such is power of Rome that when, in 1999, Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard apologised for his predecessor’s mistakes, Bouchard merely “offered nominal compensation” to those like Herve and Alice, and he still insisted on lauding the “great deal of devotion” that the nuns had shown.
An internet search has revealed that, just as the trickle of reports of paedophile priests in the 1990’s became a torrent, so the same is now happening for nuns, and more financial settlements are likely.
