Abused Quebec Orphans Do Deserve an Apology, But Not From Bishops

JOE WOODARD

MONTREAL—The bishops of Quebec are refusing to apologize to thousands of orphans who came under the care of Catholic nursing orders in the 1940s and 1950s.

They say there may be reason for others to do so — but not them.

“Such an apology … would be a betrayal of the efforts of those persons who have dedicated their lives to helping the least fortunate,” said the bishops of Canada's French-speaking province in a Sept. 15 statement.

Meanwhile, in response to the Quebec bishops’ statement, the Duplessis Orphans Committee has called for a boycott of parish collection plates. Beginning Oct. 3, the orphans said they would distribute pamphlets at Church doors and encourage worshippers to withhold their Sunday contributions.

The flap goes back to decades-ago regulations that prompted the provincial government to designate more than 5,000 children as psychiatric patients instead of public wards. The regulations allowed the orphans to be housed in Catholic institutions for the mentally ill. Many orphanages were also re-classified as asylums in order to be made eligible for government funding.

Since 1992, the 3,000 surviving “Duplessis orphans” have been seeking an apology and restitution from both Church and state for a policy that left them largely uneducated and with the social stigma of mental illness.

A smaller number are also alleging particular cases of physical, mental and sexual abuse, usually at the hands of civil servants and lay employees.

Other orphans from the era acknowledge the shortcomings of the old system but object to the idea that the Church, especially the religious nuns and brothers who cared for the children, should be blamed.

In 1997, the provincial ombudsman recommended that the province issue an apology and pay out $55 million. Instead, the government offered $3 million along with Premier Lucien Bouchard's advice that “the victims should turn the page and go on.”

That proposal was rejected, along with the bishops’ offer of support through the Church's network of social services.

In its statement, the bishops said “the Church does not intend to make any financial contribution to individuals or to a fund intended to assist the Duplessis orphans.

“We consider that the Church has already given a lot and continues to give generously. We are ready to continue the community actions in which we have been involved for many years,” and cooperate with other government efforts.

Les Orphelins de Duplessis take their name from Maurice Duplessis, Quebec premier from 1936-39 and 1944-59 who was renowned for both his devout Catholicism and his political conservatism.

Since the English conquest of 1756, Quebec has been isolated amidst North America's “Protestantizing Anglo-Saxonism,” and traditionally defended its French Catholicism through a “Holy Alliance” of Church and provincial government.

The Church long provided the province's educational and social services on a contract basis for the province, which served as treasurer and gate-keeper. The arrangement worked while Quebec was predominantly rural, but post-war urbanization brought the temptations of patronage, graft and prejudice.

In the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the province's secular liberals were able to tar the moral authority of the Church with the political corruption of the government. As a result, Quebec's Sunday Mass attendance today is at about 15%, and its birth rate ranks among the lowest in the world.

By 1954, the more than 5,000 Duplessis orphans made up an estimated 25% of the province's mental patients, officially classified as such for the sake of federal hospital funding. For example, St. Julien's Hospital at the time was home to 500 healthy orphans and 900 insane adults.

Much press attention has been devoted to alleged cases of sexual abuse, electric shock treatment and straitjacket confinement. However, when the Duplessis Orphans Committee was organized in 1992, the 3,000 survivors filed just 241 abuse complaints with the police and only one was successfully prosecuted.

While the secular media has dwelt largely on the sensational, the committee's complaint has focused primarily on the “misdiagnosis” of the orphans by the state that robbed them of proper schooling, sometimes required them to perform unpaid hospital labor, and left them with the lifelong tag of mental disability.

University of Montreal psychiatrist Jean Gaudreau, a member of a 1961 medical survey of the orphans, said that “many had [normal] intellectual potential,” but “suffered from cultural and sensory deprivation.” A large proportion of the orphans were the children of single mothers, for whom there was no other social assistance.

“We're not blaming the sisters for anything,” committee spokesman Carlo Tarini told the Register. “We're holding the bishops responsible, and they're hiding behind the religious orders.”

At one orphanage, Tarini said, a mother superior informed 350 crying children that, for legal reasons, they were all “crazy.” The black habits changed to white, bars went up on the windows, and schooling was replaced with a hospital timetable, he said.

In their statement, the bishops concluded: “Unfortunately, history cannot be altered, which is why we believe that it is preferable to devote our time and energies to meeting today the needs of persons who are requesting our assistance.”

Vincent deVilliers, a member of the Company of Montreal lay religious community, is a Duplessis orphan who objects to the actions of the orphans’ committee. “The sisters continued to treat the orphans like orphans” and not as mental patients, he told the Register.

When his orphanage became an asylum in 1954, deVilliers had made it only to the fourth grade, and his schooling abruptly stopped. “But they didn't treat us like mental cases,” he insisted. “And the committee is wrong to say that the Church and government were in collusion.”

Given that the children needed food, clothing, and shelter, he said the charitable orders were merely doing whatever they could under the rules of the time and with the resources that were then available to them.

The seven orders who cared for the Duplessis orphans include the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Grey Nuns, the Small Franciscans of Mary, the Brothers of Charity and the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy.

In their statement, the bishops reject the orphan committee's call for a “dialogue,” because the committee has “instituted legal proceedings against certain religious authorities.” The committee, however, denies that it has any outstanding legal actions, though particular individuals may have their own civil suits working their way through the courts.

“The whole controversy seems to be driven by the stigma of insanity,” said a provincial court judge who asked not to be identified. “The nuns may have done the best they could, but the orphans ended up living with the label of mental illness.”

Joe Woodard writes from Calgary, Canada.