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For many Catholics around the world, reports in 1989 of physical and sexual assaults at an orphanage for boys in Newfoundland may have been the first time they ever heard of the abuse of children by Catholic clergy and male religious. As awful as those first reports out of the Mount Cashel Orphanage were, they would prove to be not the end of something—a horror story from an isolated place—but the beginning of a scandal that would eventually rock the global church.
Last week, what may be the final act of the Mount Cashel scandal concluded. The Catholic Register of Toronto reports that a court-empowered third-party insolvency monitor has ordered the Archdiocese of St. John’s to pay over 104 million Canadian dollars (about $76 million) to 292 survivors of Mount Cashel who were victimized behind its walls. (The settlement also includes abuse claims filed against archdiocesan personnel.)
According to the report, individual settlements for successful claims range between 55,000 Canadian dollars ($40,300) and 850,000 Canadian dollars ($624,000); the average claim award is approximately 356,000 Canadian dollars ($261,000) per plaintiff.
The announcement on July 5 was met with relief and sorrow by survivors, Geoff Budden, an attorney representing 200 claimants, told Canadian media. He said many of his clients have been contending with court proceedings related to their claims for decades.
Some of the settlements cover events that occurred as far back as the 1940s. It has taken years for the cases to wind their way through Canadian courts, in part because the archdiocese initially argued that the responsibility for the abuses remained limited to the Congregation of the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada who ran Mount Cashel. The orphanage was established by the Christian Brothers in 1898.
“Some [survivors] get validation from this [settlement],” Mr. Budden told Canadian media. ”They are happy that they were believed, that their claims were accepted and they’re going to receive compensation...but it triggers. It brings back memories, and it’s a struggle.”
The archdiocese declared bankruptcy in 2021 after the Canadian Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal of a lower court ruling that found it jointly responsible with the Christian Brothers for the outrages at Mount Cashel. That decision should not have come as a surprise. An investigation commissioned by the archdiocese itself to look into the scandal in 1990 harshly criticized church officials for the ineffectiveness and negligence of the institutional response to allegations of child abuse at Mount Cashel and elsewhere in the archdiocese.
According to the Winter Commission, “Archdiocesan leadership did, in fact, have knowledge, since the mid-1970s, of deviant or sexually inappropriate behaviour among some Roman Catholic clergy in this Archdiocese. This was long before victims publicly disclosed that they had been abused as children. However, instead of a proper and effective response to this knowledge, Church leaders either denied the problems, admonished the clergy involved, or established self-help programmes which proved to be inadequate.”
It continued: “The local Church’s response to the pastoral and clinical needs of the victims lacked a sense of Christian compassion and contravened basic principles which govern the Church, the people of God. When the victims and their families needed their Church the most, it failed them. With the passage of time the pain which the victims and their families suffered has not waned; nor has the anguish felt by the whole Church community.”
Newfoundland police first heard reports of abuse at the orphanage as early as 1974, but a conspiracy of silence enveloped Mount Cashel. As other allegations of abuse trickled out over the following years, police, church and even provincial media, in what would become a grotesquely familiar pattern, worked together to keep the abuse hidden from the public while “problem” priests and brothers were handled quietly, directed to therapy or removed to other pastoral assignments.
Government hearings later discovered that a Royal Newfoundland Constabulary investigation in 1975 had been simply shut down even after a police officer interviewed 24 children from Mount Cashel about their assaults and two Christian Brothers confessed to them.
Though local papers first reported on abuse allegations at the orphanage in 1979, it was not until the story was picked up by The Sunday Express in 1989—a decade before The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team authored its expose of abuse and coverup in the Archdiocese of Boston—that the broader public became aware of the horrors that occurred behind the walls of Mount Cashel. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the justice system’s handling of child-abuse allegations at Mount Cashel during the 1970s began in April of that year, and the archdiocese commissioned its own review just days after.
With about 70 boys still at the orphanage, the Christian Brothers announced in November 1989 that Mount Cashel would be closed. Over the next four years, nine Christian Brothers who worked at Mount Cashel in the 1970s were convicted of abuse and received prison terms ranging from one to 13 years.
In 1990, the orphanage was closed. In 1992, the Christian Brothers issued an apology to its survivors and Mount Cashel was demolished. The Newfoundland government accepted its responsibility for not protecting the boys of Mount Cashel from the predators among the Christian Brothers in a confidential out-of-court settlement with 40 survivors in 1996.
The scandal at Mount Cashel and other cases of clerical sexual assault and abuse has in the years since consumed the Archdiocese of St. John’s, both figuratively and literally. Over the past three years, the archdiocese has been selling off church assets to finance the anticipated settlements.
That ecclesial fire sale has included many church properties. Not even the Basilica Cathedral was spared. While some church sales have been made to foundations and groups that pledge to protect the historic properties and maintain their pastoral and liturgical missions, other sales went to property developers who intend to tear down or recast church properties as retail or residential sites.
The impact on the archdiocesan community has been brutal as parishioners lose the churches where generations of their families had been baptized, wed and buried. And more pain is to come before all the survivors receive compensation. The archdiocese has so far raised about $32 million of the $76 million it has been ordered to pay, so asset sales will continue.
Archbishop Peter Hundt, in a letter to the St. John’s archdiocesan community, said that the archdiocese would continue to “work collaboratively with the Court and with legal counsel for the Claimants in determining a fair and just settlement of these claims.” He added that the archdiocese was continuing “its efforts to liquidate all of its remaining assets.”
He called the final determinations filed by the claims officer “an important step forward in the process of settling claims of the victims of abuse. However, there is still much to be done: in settling the claims against the [archdiocese]; in bringing healing to the victims, their families and the Archdiocesan Faith community; and in bringing closure to this dark chapter of the history of the Archdiocese.”
Some claimants have already died, so it will be their estates that receive the settlements awarded them. And it is likely that many survivors and their families will never be compensated for what happened to them as young boys at Mount Cashel. Having been unable to ever share what they experienced even with a loved one, let alone a police officer or an attorney, they have taken that desolation with them to the grave.
More from America
A Deeper Dive
- Selling churches to pay for sins
- Mount Cashel, and the redemptive power of pulling stories from the darkness
- The Report of the Archdiocesan Commission of Enquiry into the Sexual Abuse of Children by Members of the Clergy
- Mount Cashel Orphanage Abuse Scandal
- Protecting Minors from Sexual Abuse: A Call to the Catholic Faithful in Canada for Healing, Reconciliation and Transformation
