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Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
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Bernard McGrath molested boys in his care for decades, but
the trail of destroyed lives he has left may be only part of a shocking
sex-abuse network which thrived in a Catholic order on both sides of the
Tasman. In the fuzzy tones of a
1970s photograph, a kindly-faced young man in a cardigan stands surrounded by
boys. Nothing about the
innocuous snapshot of Brother Bernard at Marylands special school on the
outskirts of Christchurch suggests that he would be responsible for a trail
of misery that would span the next 25 years and leave traumatised victims on
both sides of the Tasman. There is no hint that a
disproportionate number of the fresh-faced boys in the photo, if they are
representative of the dozens who claim they were sexually molested by Bernard
Kevin McGrath, will have committed suicide, been in and out of jail, or
unable to hold down jobs or maintain healthy relationships. Nor is there anything
to suggest the despair that would be felt by the few boys who raised the
alarm about the sexual abuse at the time, only to discover that McGrath was
not a rogue member of the Order of St John of God, but part of a network of
child- molesting Catholic brethren. The photo became just
one small piece of evidence put forward in New Zealand's biggest child-sex
trial, which started with 54 charges and 17 complainants. It ended in 21
convictions relating to eight victims, bringing to 15 the number of boys
McGrath has been convicted of sexually molesting in Christchurch over the
space of 17 years. But while the scale of
the abuse outstrips even the contentious Christchurch Civic Creche case that
took place in the same court more than 10 years earlier, the sobering
statistic is that McGrath's offending poses deeply troubling questions about
a much bigger and even uglier picture. If McGrath's sexual
predilections had been not been allowed to continue by transferring him from
diocese to diocese, would a Sydney mother named Jan have had to flee from her
son as he smashed her home? If complaints by early
Marylands' victims had not fallen on deaf ears, would a group of Christchurch
youth workers have had to threaten to resign in the early 1990s unless
McGrath was brought to account for his indecent dealings with street kids? If the Order of St John
of God had not included gagging clauses in the compensation deals to those who
complained of sexual abuse by McGrath and other Catholic brethren, would
other victims not have had to suffer in isolation as they tried to come to
terms with being molested by those who were supposed to protect them? If the allegations had
been raised earlier, might a former Marylands prior, whose deteriorating
mental faculties helped him avoid extradition from Australia, have been
brought back to face terrestrial justice on child-sex charges dating back to
Marylands' founding in 1955? And if the culture of
sexual abuse had been halted when it first began, would Male Survivors of
Sexual Abuse Trust manager Ken Clearwater have a list of two dozen Marylands
boys who have killed themselves or died mysteriously young after coming into
contact with McGrath and his brethren? Bernard McGrath knows
he's not a paedophile, in the strict clinical definition of the term. He also
knows the type of boys he liked to touch sexually – Greek or Italian in
origin but with smooth, woman-like bodies. He also knows the importance
of a Catholic brother's vow of chastity. It was why he spurned what he
perceived as the amorous affections of a female Marylands teacher and instead
imagined being with her when he was rubbing himself against terrified boys in
his dorm. He knows the full
extent of his sexual offending, even vowing he would be happy to stand in
front of his creator and state that it had never involved oral sex. But he
had already pleaded guilty to offending that included oral sex and been
jailed for it. Those were among the
glimpses into the strange world as perceived by Bernard McGrath that the jury
experienced through his rambling, unreliable, and, at times, breathtakingly
self-serving videotaped interview with Christchurch detectives in 2003. Over six hours, it varied
between being emotional, confessional and delusional, but the over-riding
impression left behind was that McGrath was as messed-up mentally as some of
the intellectually and behaviourally disordered boys who had been sent to
Marylands to be straightened out. McGrath told about
being cowed by a violent and authoritarian father who had trained for the
Catholic priesthood but ended up as a Kaiapoi freezing worker. At 14, McGrath tried to
kill himself and spoke about "death being my friend". At 18, it was
his father's decree that Bernard had a vocation to religious life; an
assessment by a man who had not completed his own clerical training. The Australasian branch
of the Order of St John of God was based in Sydney, where McGrath went for his
training, but he said a senior brother there soon began to make sexual
overtures towards the trainees. "He didn't put
direct pressure on me at that stage, but even then I was a victim really,
too," he explained. "I kind of couldn't say no, you know. I couldn't
say yes either. I've never been able to stand up for my bloody self." The details of the
sexual abuse McGrath claimed he suffered – being led to another senior
brother's room on an innocent pretence, then forced to partake in indecencies
– would later be eerily close to the accounts by boys at Marylands. "I never told
anybody, you know," McGrath told detectives. "I suppose it was at
that point that the cloud of depression might have started, you know." McGrath spent a year at
a St John of God institution in Melbourne – if sexual abuse happened there,
it has not led to charges – then was transferred to Marylands, where he says
he encountered the same brother who made sexual overtures to him in Sydney. That brother – who can
only be called Brother X because of a court suppression order, and who is
fighting extradition back to New Zealand to answer child sex charges –
allegedly set the tone for the culture at Marylands and ensured that
complaints about sexual abuse by brothers like McGrath were never acted on. McGrath said that when
he was confronted with his sexual abuse nearly 20 years later, he was sent
for treatment at a centre in the United States where his offending was
analysed. "The triggers for
my high-risk situations were looking for some emotional need to be met,"
he said. "Internally, I was just screaming out for affection, I suppose
the same as those kids. "This cloud of
depression would start. I don't think I'd actually set the situation up. It
was just, well, the situation was always there because you were living and
breathing with them all day. "(Afterwards) I'd
want everything clean. I'd wash my own clothes and then the guilt came off.
Oh, the guilt, the guilt was absolutely terrible, you know, absolutely
hideous. You feel like scum, which society thinks you are – and you are, too
– then the whole cycle would begin again." The court was told that
some boys would complain to senior Catholic brethren about sexual abuse. Not
only was nothing done but they would be punished for their efforts. McGrath said a boy from
another dorm came to him to complain about being sexually abused. "I
didn't do anything because I'd played up myself, you know, so what do you do?
How do you go and challenge someone when you've committed these sins." McGrath spent nearly
four years at Marylands until one of his most consistent victims began to
make a fuss to Brother X about the regular sexual abuse. Within a month or so
over the holidays, both McGrath and Brother X were suddenly transferred to
other St John of God dioceses. Critics have accused
the order of operating the Catholic church's maligned "geographical
cure" – allowing child-molesting clergy and brethren to continue their
abuse elsewhere when their victim's complaints in one diocese became too vocal.
In each location, victims thought they were alone in their suffering. McGrath was sent to
Morriset, a Catholic boarding school north of Sydney for boys with
behavioural problems. Away from the influence
of Brother X and other allegedly child-molesting Catholic brethren from
Marylands, McGrath continued to sexually abuse boys. "Why?" he
told detectives. "Because I was sick. I was sick, yeah, I was caught up
in a spiral I couldn't break. A spiral of destruction." Jan says she feels as
if a knife is going into her stomach when she recalls how she sent her son
Jason to Morriset school in the early 1980s because his dyslexia was making
him too disruptive to remain in the school he was attending. "I didn't want him
to go, but a teacher told me Jason needs more help than he could give him. I
went to all the other schools in the local area and they refused to take
him," she says. "I knew nothing
about (the abuse) until Jason told me years later. I knew he wasn't happy at
Morriset, but they covered it up so well and scared the kids so much. "I used to ring
Brother McGrath and said Jason isn't happy and he's crying. McGrath just said
all the boys do that; he just doesn't want the discipline and they need
discipline. He came across as a good disciplining parent. "I didn't learn
about the abuse until 1989. Jason had a girlfriend and their relationship was
pretty volatile and he was on drugs pretty heavily in his teenage years. "She'd charged him
with assault and when we were going to court he said `I've got something
terrible to tell you' and that's when it all came out. I didn't believe him
at first. Talk about naive – I couldn't believe it could happen." Jan says there were
hints that McGrath's proclivities were known to the Order of St John of God,
but nothing was done. "Their conspiracy
of silence is terrible. A psychologist at the school said (at the time) there
were problems at this school and to try to get Jason out as soon as you can.
I said there was nowhere else to go," she adds. "When I told her
later about McGrath, she said `I wouldn't have picked him'. There were others
there she must have known about. "I now know of
five boys (who were molested at Morriset). I don't think we've even scratched
the surface. The tragedy is that Jason must have felt so alone. "My life hasn't
been the same since. I've tried to get on with my life but it hits me
sometimes. I feel very remorseful about Jason – it's like a knife going in. "In the early years,
he blamed me for putting him in that school. He went violent one night and I
had to run next door to a neighbour and bolt the door. I know if I'd stayed
in the house, he'd have done something to me." Frustration and shame
channelled into anger is familiar to Ken Clearwater, who deals with nearly 40
former Marylands' boys through his role as manager of the Male Survivors of
Sexual Abuse Trust. Jason is not the first
of McGrath's victims to attack his mother for putting him in the care of an
order that blighted his life. One of the Marylands' boys tried to kill his
mother but she continued to have him in her house because he had nowhere else
to go. She had believed assurances from Brother X that the boy was making it
up. For one of the 17
complainants at McGrath's trial, the anger was directed at churches because
they brought back ugly memories. He would attack the building and end up in
jail. McGrath was cleared of molesting him. Eight of the Marylands'
boys Clearwater deals with are in jail. One is facing trial this year for a
vicious rape of a woman who had been trying to rehabilitate him. Other former Marylands'
boys self-medicate themselves into oblivion with alcohol and drugs. But for a
depressingly large number of former Marylands' boys, the anger was directed
at themselves. The wall in Clearwater's office in Community House – a group
of charitable organisations that once included McGrath's Hebron Trust –
features a catalogue of memorial notices far in excess of what one might
expect for men aged around 40. "There are 25 guys
who we know have taken their lives. I know one just after Christmas. He left
a note and said he couldn't take it any more of what that bastard did to him.
He was at the Hebron trust," he says. Media reports of
McGrath's trial this week have also caused a reawakening of a past they had
tried to put behind them. Even in Sydney, one man who McGrath admitted
repeatedly molesting at Marylands made a suicide attempt this week. "At Marylands
there was a fear factor and an iron fist. Then there was sexual abuse,"
Clearwater adds. "So many of them lived with the fact that they went on
to abuse other boys. Where does that put them? They'll be carrying all that
blame and guilt." But for some, the trial
has stirred feelings of unease that are less about the misery left behind by
sexual abuse at Marylands and more to do with a groundswell against Catholic
clergy and brethren. One is Lynley Hood, the
Dunedin author whose book, A City Possessed, asserted that moral panic about
ritual abuse led to unsafe convictions of Peter Ellis in the Civic Creche
case. She admits to keeping
an eye on the Marylands and St John of God cases and seeing signs of moral
panic at work there but declined to comment further. In court, McGrath's
lawyer Raoul Neave also questioned how McGrath could get a fair hearing in
the climate of suspicion about the Catholic church. "Unless you've
been living in a cave on the Moon for the last couple of years, you'll be
well aware of the long campaign against the Catholic church and Catholic
brothers and abuse by members of the Catholic clergy against children,"
he said to the jury. "It's had the
effect, quite unfortunately in this case, to give rise to a massive amount of
prejudice and hysteria." But unlike the Civic Creche,
a key to Neave's stance was his acceptance that awful sexual offending by the
Catholic clergy and brothers happened at Marylands and that McGrath was part
of it. However, it was a long
time before the Order of St John of God reached that stage of accepting abuse
occurred. In 1986, McGrath left Morriset without being challenged about his
sexual proclivities and returned to Christchurch to establish a programme
teaching life skills to street kids. By then, Marylands was
no longer being run by the order, but McGrath set up a residential lifeskills
course at a Halswell Road house. He was to find that other aspects of society
were changing too, including a shift in perception of the Catholic church's
from irreproachability to where child-sex scandals by clergy seem almost
commonplace. But it was two social
workers, and not the Order of St John of God, who raised the alarm about
McGrath's indecent advances towards four of the street kids on his course in
1991. According to reports at the time, the social workers raised the issue
with the order and it was only when that failed to produce results that they
went to the police. Suddenly McGrath's
world began to crumble. Four of the Hebron Trust boys, aged then between 14
and 16, told detectives that McGrath had touched them indecently. Then two of
the former Marylands' boys, now grown men, also complained McGrath had
sexually molested them while at the school. By then Jason, in
Sydney, had disclosed to his mother what McGrath had done to him in the 1980s
while at Morriset school. When McGrath completed his three-year jail term
imposed in Christchurch for his Marylands and the Hebron Trust offending, he
was taken to Sydney, where he was sentenced to nine months jail on six
child-sex charges involving Jason. The head of the
Australasian branch of the Order of St John of God, Brother Peter Burke,
insists it was not until early in 1992 that the St John of God hierarchy
heard the allegation about McGrath with the Hebron Trust children. He accepts
there might have been "very secret information among a certain group of
people" before then, but the order itself would have been unaware. Once it was aware, the
order began to make "pastoral gestures" – compensation – to those
who had fallen prey to McGrath and others. But the order was still a long way
from the transparency to which it now aspires. Included in the payments was
small print forbidding disclosure of it to anyone outside of a small coterie
of immediate family, lawyers and counsellors. The order might have finally
accepted there were child molesters among its clergy and brethren but it was
trying to keep a lid on it. One man who received a
$30,000 payout after claiming he was sexually abused by a Catholic brother at
Marylands in the 1950s, was terrified he would lose his house if he helped
spread the word about what happened there. Brother Burke says now
that such conditions were never meant to be gagging orders and the order has
adopted a new policy specifically preventing confidentiality restraints. Finally, in 2002, The
Press investigated claims of widespread and institutionalised sexual abuse of
boys at Marylands, setting in train the process which this week saw Bernard
McGrath found guilty of 21 child-sex charges. |
