|
|
Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
|
|
|
|
Wellington: The sister
of a woman suing Catholic authorities for alleged abuse at the hands of nuns
and priests has told a court of being force-fed tripe and boiled cabbage. Her sister is claiming
$550,000 in a civil suit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Wellington, Catholic Social Services, the Sisters of Mercy (Wellington) Trust
Board and St Joseph’s Orphanage Trust Board. She told Justice Marion
Frater in the High Court at Wellington yesterday that she and her two older
sisters lived at St Joseph’s orphanage in Upper Hutt in the 1960s and ’70s,
after their parents’ marriage broke up. She was never able to
spend time with her sisters while there and felt lonely, scared and unwanted.
No-one explained to her what had happened to her family and why she was
there. She recounted being hit
with leather straps wielded by nuns and being told she was “nobody’s child”,
or that no-one loved her. The nuns kept their
straps in their habits or a pocket and hardly a day went by when she was not
belted, she said. One of the straps had a sharp end that would cut her hand
or legs. Once a week, she said,
she was force-fed. She remembered being fed tripe and boiled cabbage and
warning the nuns that she would vomit if they made her eat the sago pudding. When she was 6, her
mouth was washed out with soap for telling a dirty rhyme, she said. One punishment was to
be locked up in a room, and sometimes she did not know how long she had been
in there when they let her out. The nuns and priests
also carried out exorcisms on her but when questioned by the lawyer for the
Sisters of Mercy, Chris Finlayson, about what she remembered, she said she
was prayed over, with them trying to get the devil out of her. Several times she
shouted at the lawyers when they questioned her memory of the years she spent
there. “I’d love to show you
what it felt like to be hit and when it [the strap] missed . . . do you want
to get cut too, mate?” she asked Mr Finlayson. School holidays were
sometimes spent with a foster family and they learnt to be slaves, working
around the house. She told the judge her
sister was blamed for a fire in one of the dormitories, but her sister had
nothing to do with it. She had been the lookout while other girls lit the
fire. She told the lawyer for
Catholic Social Services, Greg Thomas, that she did not accept she was wrong
about the abuse but might not remember all the dates. The case is expected to
take at least another week. |
