[CHRISTIA] The 'Duplessis Orphans' Battle On For A Catholic
Barry Hardy
International Herald Tribune (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
March 6, 1999, Saturday
SECTION: News; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 917 words
HEADLINE: In Quebec, the 'Duplessis Orphans' Battle On for a Catholic
Church Apology
BYLINE: By Anthony DePalma; New York Times Service
DATELINE: MONTREAL
BODY:
Down by the St. Lawrence River, in the parish hall behind the somber
stone church of St. Peter the Apostle, Herve Bertrand and other French
Canadian Catholics gathered recently to condemn the church that has
so thoroughly shaped most aspects of life in the province of Quebec.
''I don't have any problem with their God,'' Mr. Bertrand said. ''But
I've got
big problems with the people who made the decision that did this to me.''
He is a 56-year-old plumber from a Montreal suburb with a wife and three
grown children. He is also one of about 3,000 French Canadians known
as the ''Duplessis orphans'' because they were institutionalized in the
1940s and 1950s when Maurice Duplessis was the iron-willed premier
of Quebec.
About 300 of the orphans have formed a committee and are demanding
an apology and restitution from the Roman Catholic Church and the
Quebec government for the way they were treated, and some say
physically and sexually abused, when they were unjustifiably placed in
mental institutions as children. Mr. Bertrand says employees at the
institution where he was kept for eight years sexually assaulted him more
than 30 times, the last in an elevator while he was in a straitjacket.
Most of the ''Duplessis orphans'' were not orphans at all. Like Mr.
Bertrand,
they had been born out of wedlock at a time when conservative Catholic
sentiments made it wise to keep such transgressions secret. Many
illegitimate children were raised in orphanages run by Roman Catholic
nuns.
The Duplessis government worked hand in hand with the Catholic
Church. When federal money became available for health care, but not
education, the government encouraged the religious order to transform
their orphanages into mental institutions.
''Quite simply, it was more profitable for the Quebec government and the
church to warehouse psychiatric patients than to take care of normal
children, so they struck a dirty deal,'' said Rodrigue Vienneau. His
wife,
Clarina Duguay, was declared mentally incompetent and kept in a
church-run institution after her mother became sick and her father, a
woodsman, was unable to care for his five children.
''When I was 11, they falsified my medical records and classified me
as mentally deficient,'' Mrs. Duguay said. Like many women in Quebec,
she kept her maiden name after she married.
Jean Gaudreau, a psychologist at the University of Montreal who visited
one of the orphanages in 1961, said there was little doubt that children
were unnecessarily institutionalized during that time. Tests conducted
then showed, he said, that mental deficiencies were often caused by
lack of stimulation, not mental illness.
While unable to prove any specific charges of abuse, a government
ombudsman in 1997 documented the existence of as many as 3,000
Duplessis orphans. Without determining who was at fault, the
ombudsman recommended that they be compensated.
On Thursday, Premier Lucien Bouchard of Quebec offered the orphans
an apology, along with compensation worth the equivalent of about $2
million. But the committee rejected the offer, which comes to about $670
for each orphan, and insisted on a full public inquiry.
As they fight for recognition and justice, the orphans are reminding
other
Quebeckers of the enormous changes that have taken place in the
province since the 1940s and 1950s.
''What Quebec has undergone is a major cultural trauma,'' said J. Robert
Choquette, a professor of Canadian religious history at the University of
Ottawa.
The changes set off by Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s touched
Catholics around the world, but few places felt it as deeply as Quebec.
''The church's dominance in Quebec was sweeping,'' Mr. Choquette said.
At its apogee in the 1940s, the church ran all schools, hospitals and
social institutions, like the orphanages, with the consent of the
government.
Mr. Duplessis's death in 1959 coincided with an awakening of social
awareness that ushered in enormous changes for religion and society
and set off a conflict between tradition and modernism.
Today, the small churches and grand cathedrals that once overflowed
with the faithful on Sundays are sparsely attended. Quebec's birth rate
has dropped from one of the world's highest to one of the lowest, in part
because the use of contraceptives is now widely accepted and abortion
is legal. The province has gone from having one of the lowest rates of
divorce - prohibited by the Catholic Church - to one of the highest. It
also
has one of the lowest rates of marriage in Canada, and 53 percent of its
children are born out of wedlock.
Even so, the church's presence is virtually inescapable, so much so that
when the orphans denounced the church, they did so in rented space at
a parish community center.
A few weeks ago, some of the orphans, wearing straitjackets of the type
they say were used on them as children, demonstrated before the
Montreal offices of the head of the church in Quebec, Jean-Claude
Cardinal Turcotte. They demanded an apology, a public inquiry and
compensation.
The cardinal refused to meet the orphans, but he did say he did not
believe that the nuns who ran the institutions, often under very
difficult
conditions, had systematically abused their patients.
''When they watch television and hear protesters claim they beat
children,
that is upsetting,'' he told a local reporter.
Instead of issuing an apology, he challenged the orphans to prove they
were abused.
Sincerely,
Barry L. Hardy
barry...@juno.com
What Anti-Cult Propagandists Don't Want You To Read:
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