Speaking of the…oddities of the Catholic church, there’s one order in Australia in which 70% of the bros are suspected of child abuse. Seventy percent.
Up to 200 victims have sought compensation from the St John of God order after alleging they had been abused in special schools and homes run by the brothers in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.
Last week a Melbourne inquiry into child abuse heard allegations that Brothers had drugged and pack-raped boys at their operations in Victoria.
Claims were also made that two boys had allegedly been beaten so badly they were thought to have died but their deaths had not been reported to authorities.
And Fairfax Media has obtained documents revealing that in the 1960s and 1970s dozens of boys were brutally assaulted at Kendall Grange, the order’s school for mentally and physically impaired boys at Morisset on the NSW central coast.
Michelle Mulvihill is a psychologist who was employed by the order to meet victims.
Dr Mulvihill, who is based in Sydney, worked with the order for nine years from 1998, sitting in on meetings involving negotiators from the order and 150 victims in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.
But she says she quit the job in 2007, fearing that suspected paedophile Brothers still wielded too much power in the order and were interfering with victims’ compensation and treatment.
On Sunday she described the order as hosting Brothers who were responsible for “the worst examples of child abuse I have ever heard of” and said of the 40 to 50 Brothers who had been in the order around the time she was involved, about 75 per cent had been the subject of allegations.
Another scene out of nightmares.
H/t Ian MacDougall.