So it was true, after all

In 1999, some young adults went public with the information that they had been physically and psychologically abused as children in an institution run by nuns in Gozo.

I never doubted for a moment that what they said was the truth. The devil is in the detail, and there are some details that just ring true. You have to be a smart liar indeed to come up with descriptions of how you were made to eat your own vomit after being force-fed and throwing up, or how you had your hand ironed with a clothes-iron, of how you were dragged by your hair along the institution corridors. And what would be the point of inventing stories like this in adulthood, in any case, in a country with absolutely no compensation culture for victims and no justice wrought on priests and nuns who abuse children?

Apart from the fact that the detail of their claims sounded authentic, there was another reason why I didn’t doubt for a minute that they were speaking from experience. I spent the first 13 years of my life at a convent school run by nuns, and so I do not automatically assume that they are meek and holy or even nice, nor do I have any respect for them which is not earned. My reaction to a wimple and habit is not: “Oh, she must be a good person,” but “Brrrrrr! Prove to me that you’re not a nasty piece of work and I might believe you.”

Good nuns are like anyone else – ordinary women with their own particular kindnesses and failings. There were no saintly or especially kind and nice nuns at my school. There were just ordinary women in a wimple and habit. Some of them were so ordinary that they couldn’t take the routine and restrictions any more and ditched them for civilian life. Ah, but nasty nuns belong in a special category of their own when it comes to viciousness, spite and vindictiveness. There is a reason for this. It isn’t because nuns in general are nasty (of course not) or because nasty women are attracted to convent life (again, of course not). It’s because that particular way of life fosters a sense of peace in the rare few, but a build-up of anger, resentment and frustration in others.

Nuns’ vocations have dwindled to almost nothing nowadays. It’s not because of a decline in religious belief or even because the nun’s way of life is now deemed to be irrelevant, given that you can perform charity or pro bono work without taking vows of poverty, chastity or obedience. No, it’s because in the contemporary world, plain women with no particular skills or talents can make a life for themselves regardless. They can earn money, travel, get around, buy flats, cars and nice clothes, do themselves up and go on dates, teach children if they want to without taking vows, and so on and so forth. They might even meet a man and start a family, because that no longer depends on marriage, marriage itself no longer depends on the same factors that it did 40 years ago.

But back then in the dark ages – and boy, do they seem like the dark ages from the perspective of anyone growing up today – a plain woman with no suitors and no hope of ever earning enough money to set up her own home, even if she could find a job in the first place, which was difficult, faced the wonderful prospect of becoming a live-in unpaid slave to her aged parents until the end of their days, following which she would end up a lonely spinster living off some miserable pension. In this scenario, some women would convince themselves, or allow themselves to be convinced, that they had a vocation. Religious orders would even groom the unattractive girls who sucked up to the nuns for attention and who curried favour by developing a passion for Christ and religion. Most of these crushes evaporated into nothing once the girls in question developed their first passion for a real, live, actual boy, leaving the nuns disappointed. Others, perhaps because they were too weak, couldn’t get away. Once inside the order, they succumbed to the pressure and didn’t have the guts to break away and leave, or they had no life to go to as an ex-nun. The boiling resentment would be taken out on the children in their care, or on fellow nuns.

This is not a generalisation, but a depiction of a scenario that made certain nuns what they were. I am overwhelmed by admiration and respect for the hardworking, decent nuns whom I have met in the course of my life, looking after children, old people, refugees and victims of domestic violence. I do wonder why they felt they had to become nuns to do what they do, but that is beside the point. The point is that life in a strict religious order, for those who would have preferred another kind of life altogether but couldn’t get it, was a recipe for disaster, causing a build-up of simmering rage and hatred that spilled out on those who were most readily available and immediately vulnerable. The spectacularly vicious nun is not a cliché of myth and legend, but she was very much a reality. It is only because today’s nuns are the result of true vocations that we don’t get so much of this kind of thing anymore.

In 1999, when those young adults spoke, they were pooh-poohed by many and accused of having a hidden or dubious agenda. The then bishop of Gozo, Nikol Cauchi, set up a commission to study the claims, and some time later it was announced with great fanfare that those claims were unfounded. I remember feeling very angry for the individuals who had somehow found the moral courage, perhaps as a way of coming to terms with what had happened to them, to speak out in public and accuse their abusers even after so many years.

Strangely, the fact that they waited so long seems to have worked against their credibility where some observers were concerned. How little these people understand human psychology, and how ill they remember the past, even the fairly recent past. Speaking freely about the abuse you were subjected to as a child is something that you can do only as an adult, when you have reached a point of equilibrium and adjustment. It is in fact the process of adjustment that gives you the motivation you need to get things off your chest. And as an adult, you are more secure and believe – wrongly, as we have seen – that you are more likely to be taken seriously. Also, it is only in the last few years that we have begun to discuss these matters openly, though it is debatable just how openly given the church’s need to pass a cloak of darkness over everything, while people protest in the newspapers. When I first starting working, we were not allowed to use the word ‘rape’. Actual rape had to be referred to as carnal knowledge. Rape as a metaphor, as in ‘the rape of the countryside’ was blue-pencilled out. If an adult who had been abused in a children’s home wished to expose his accusers, he had no medium to turn to. The only television and radio station was Xandir Malta/TVM/Radju Malta. The only newspapers apart from the ultra-conservative The Times and its sister Sunday were owned by the Nationalist Party and the General Workers Union, and there was no internet. These people had no way of making their accusations public.

The media scene changed drastically only over the last 17 years or so, but even then, it was years before we began speaking and writing about child abuse, still more child abuse by nuns and priests. It was as though these things didn’t happen, when we knew they must have been happening, and so when a few people first began to speak out courageously, they were called liars and frauds. This discouraged others from coming forward.

These particular adults, who were in the care of Dominican nuns at the Lourdes Home in Gozo when they were children, and who are of different ages, found that particular door slammed hard in their faces. The matter was taken up by the television show Bondiplus years later, in 2006. Eight men and women spoke in detail about their experiences. I was incensed at the cruelty and at the unfairness of life which heaps pain on those who have already been dealt a raw deal in terms of being abandoned by their parents and raised in a cold and barren institute by a wimple-and-habit-wearing regiment of women – an abnormal upbringing if ever there was one. Speaking for myself, I would have been happy never to see another wimple or habit again as long as I lived when I left convent-school, and I was there only Monday to Friday between 8am and 2pm in term-time. I swore that if I ever had a daughter I would send her to a state school rather than to a school run by nuns. Children should never be exposed on a daily basis to discipline meted out by women wearing weird back uniforms with no visible hair.

By then, Gozo had a new bishop, Mario Grech, whose reaction to the testimony on Bondiplus was to set up another commission to study the situation afresh. This is very much to his credit, and indicates that his reaction to hearing those former inmates – for there is no better word to describe them – speak was the nagging suspicion that what they were saying was true.

The commission, chaired by the retired (and respected) judge Victor Caruana Colombo, the lawyer Ruth Farrugia, the psychologist Angela Abela and Monsignor Fortunato Mizzi, presented its report to the Gozo diocese a few weeks ago – some 22 months past the deadline. The report was not made public, but last Friday, the bishop begged the forgiveness of those who had been abused, expressed his sorrow for what had happened, and explained that he has “appointed a team of experts who will accompany these persons through the healing process.”

That’s good of him, but I suspect that what the victims really want and need is a grovelling apology from the actual nuns who did it, if they are still alive. And if they are still alive, the bishop should haul them out and demand that they apologise – not in public via the media, as he did, but in private to the adults who they hurt so badly as vulnerable children. Of course, what those adults probably really want, in their hearts of hearts, is to see them put in the stocks in a public square, forced to eat their own vomit after being force-fed, dragged along the streets by their hair, and have parts of their bodies ironed. But they’re not going to get that, so I’m sure they’ll settle for the apology.

The bishop was quick to point out, though careful to say that it was no excuse, that there were only a few children who were abused in this way, and hundreds of others were well cared for. If he hasn’t heard of scapegoating, perhaps it should be explained to him carefully by the psychologist on the commission. This is what happens when just one or two children at any given time are picked on by the adult or adults in charge, victimised and psychologically isolated from the other children, who are encouraged to ‘hate’ the scapegoat and join in the process of singling him or her out for wicked treatment, or at the barest minimum doing nothing to help the scapegoat. The scapegoat becomes a non-person, a thing, and a culture of fear is created in which, so as to protect themselves, the rest don’t dare stand up against the cruelty. This kind of abuse of a few scapegoats is actually more terrible than the routine abuse of all the children, because if you are one abused child among many, you have the comfort of your peers. But if you are the scapegoat, you are isolated and rendered even more vulnerable.

The commission has recommended to the Gozo diocese how best to avoid a repeat performance. We have not been told what these recommendations are, but one newspaper has quoted sources as saying that whoever is known to have abused a person, particularly a child, will not be allowed to be a care-worker again. Yes, but the problem is that the ban applies only to the field of religious care-work, and because the names of the abusers are not being made public, they are free to apply for similar work in the private and public sectors.

Calls are being made for the prosecution of these nuns, but so many years have elapsed that it isn’t possible. In any case, it is not up to the Gozo diocese to hand the details over to the police. It is up to the individuals who were abused. The police cannot prosecute without a formal report, and a request to investigate and prosecute (known as a ‘kwerela’), from them. They cannot and should not investigate the abuse of individuals who are now adults unless those individuals want them to. This much should be obvious. Where children are concerned, it’s a different matter altogether. Now the authorities – and by that I mean the state, and not the church – have a duty to ensure that what happened at the Lourdes Home and other institutes cannot happen again. It is time for the government to remember that it has a responsibility towards the children in church-run institutes, because the main reason they are being looked after by priests and nuns is because the government has conveniently forgotten that it is the state that should be providing for the care of abandoned children because this is no longer the Victorian Age.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.