Recently there have been reports from Canada on demands for the Catholic Church to apologise for its actions in church run boarding schools. In Australia we have had details of the sex abuse scandals. But what we have not had from the Church, in Australia, is an apology for what its doctrinaire attitude to family planning and birth control meant for hundreds of Catholic families in the 1950s and 1960s.
Now in my seventies and still with the scars of a so called good Catholic schooling I would like the Catholic Church hierarchy to use the Plenary to offer a public apology for the pain and suffering they inflicted on our family and others in the 1950s and 1960s. The following piece outlines my reasons.
The brilliant Australian Jesuit Father Paul Mullins noted that people who romanticised Australia’s Catholic past did not live it! The equally astute Dominican Sister Maureen Purcell argued that the Australian Catholic Church was not the church of the good shepherd but one of a church of sheep dogs intent on keeping the struggling flock under strict control. I would add they were not sheep dogs but rottweilers.
Recently I came across a photo of my grandmother looking worn out and forlorn with one child on her hip as her other children played at her feet. A mother to nine herself later her first child bore 10 living children in the 1950s-1970s. Her life and that of her husband and their children was one of poverty, tension and despair. Poorly educated by barely educated and in the main sadistic and deranged nuns both parents had awful lives.
They lived firstly in a hovel. So bad was this first home that the mother was one day electrocuted by defective electrical wiring. They then moved up the street to a second home where they lived for the rest of their lives. The home was tiny, cold in winter and boiling hot in summer. One tiny room served as bathroom and laundry and contained the one toilet. The ten children were crammed into 3 tiny bed rooms.
Life was a constant struggle to survive. The father worked extremely long hours. He walked to and from work in all kinds of weather and then spent the day on his feet as a railway employee. The mother spent every day struggling to raise her ten children. It was daily cooking, cleaning, washing and never-ending ironing. There was constant tension in the air and the family dreaded unexpected expenses. There were no outings let alone holidays. There was no car and no phone.
Love was hard to find in the home. Self-delusion about how the family was not badly off was the order of the day. The reality was that the family was desperately poor and incredibly unhappy. But we were constantly regaled with the tale about the lilies of the field and how the good Lord would take care of us.
Overseeing all this was an unrelenting and oppressive Catholic Church with its rigid set of rules and regulations. Sunday Mass would see us all ranted and raved at by the Parish Priest who was obsessed with sins of the flesh. One of his favourite themes was so called ‘adult books’ which he exhorted us to buy and burn. Birth control was an evil. Large families were a blessing – no matter that ours and others in the parish lived absolutely horrible lives. In fact, the parish priest in one of his rants at the end of a parish retreat conducted by the Redemptorists reasoned that many had not turned up because they were on the contraceptive pill. He noted people wanted the pleasure of sex without the children who came with it.
The parish priest being in charge of the local parish school had an even more shocking influence on education. If the Mercy Nuns – and what a misnomer that was for many (but not all) of the sadistic and deranged ones that beat and humiliated us on a daily basis – were bad he even put in our classes women from the area who had no training in anything. They outdid the allegedly trained nuns in sadistic demeanour and behaviour. Others in the community were aghast that these people with minimal schooling could be school teachers. Students left that class unable to read or write and then left school early with special government permission. Their lives were especially blighted.
Schooling was an extension of the pain and torment that home life was. Nuns beat and humiliated us on a daily basis. Students were publicly caned and castigated on a whim. Especially deranged nuns from fourth and fifth class stand out as especially sadistic individuals who daily meted out the most awful humiliations. One in particular had an obsession with anything to do with sex. She asked the grade four boys to give her some examples of ‘dirty jokes’. Any rough play out of class was seen by her as examples of ‘self-pleasuring’ and students were called in for interrogation. And these same nuns terrorised our parents if they ever dared to complain. And what did we get from the parish priest – long sermons on how state schools were seedbeds of immorality. So bad were his out bursts on government schooling that the headmistress of the local state infant school complained. And she herself was the most devoted and loyal of Catholics being a daily Mass attender. When finally, word leaked out that I had enough of beatings and humiliation and would attend the local government school a car load of nuns headed by the pugnacious mother superior arrived at our home at lunch time one Sunday to threaten my parents that such an action would see them cut off from the Church!! My Dad left the decision to me and I left. Talk about ecclesiastical thugs. But this sort of behaviour was defended by all sorts of pious Catholics.
Others I know suffered similar experiences. One lady told me recently in the very building that was the school I suffered in that she was so badly beaten by a nun that her father threatened the order with police action if the nun was not removed. But what do we get from the Church in its official record on all this? At the least it is glossed over and at worst we get this glorious history of a Church fighting the evils of communism, Protestantism and sectarianism.
I suspect a public apology is a vain hope as the Church today in Australia is engaged in an orgy of the willing suspension of disbelief and self-congratulatory behaviour. Surrounded by servile and obedient priests from overseas who are into high ritualism I can’t see much in the way of an apology forthcoming. But a long and sincere apology from the Church hierarchy is long overdue to the many people of my age and their families who suffered from the Church’s teachings and actions. Seventy years on I still bear the scars and even more so do my surviving siblings.