Still Breathing, Barney Zwartz, The Age, June 1, 2010

Still Breathing

By Barney Zwartz
The Age
June 1, 2010

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/still-breathing-20100531-wrd2.html

Noreen Wood is fighting for justice after being a serial abuse victim. Photo by Angela Wylie

IT HAS taken most of her life to discover, but Noreen Wood knows now she is a fighter. Like most victims of sexual abuse, she has many needs - financial, physical and emotional - but the most urgent, the one that drives her even when she feels that tackling the Catholic Church is like tilting at windmills, is for the truth to be heard and acknowledged.

At least four generations of Noreen's family have been shaped by the Catholic Church. Once, like her great-grandmother - a generous donor to Mary MacKillop - she would have seen this as a blessing. No longer.

''Why I'm still breathing today, I don't know. In a million years I would never have thought the church was so corrupt,'' she says.

Advertisement: Story continues below

Her grandmother was made pregnant by a New Zealand priest, and hastily shipped across the Tasman. Her mother became an alcoholic, and Noreen, not yet three years old, was sent to a convent boarding school.

Later, as a young woman, she remained naive and innocent; and despite being deeply religious, she married a non-Catholic. For this, she was excommunicated and went on to suffer deeply from guilt and fear of death. Then, in 1978, while in the Mercy Hospital for physical and mental exhaustion, she was raped by a Jesuit priest. Some years later when she tried to complain about it to another priest, he, too, allegedly sexually abused her.

She tried to kill herself twice and spent years requiring psychological treatment. When she finally felt ready to seek justice, she says the process felt like further abuse. In particular, a mysterious legal settlement with the church was lodged in the County Court without her knowledge that surrendered her right to sue.

Now 65, in fragile health and a parlous financial state, she is still fighting for the truth to come out. But now at last, she says, she has mental clarity.

''When I look back, my anger at my abuse is heightened because now I can see it clearly. Before I was in a fog, a land with no name.''

Noreen Wood is not the only victim of a Catholic priest who was a hospital chaplain. Victims' advocate Helen Last of In Good Faith says she has several clients who were abused by chaplains; two were molested by serial abuser Barry Whelan when he was a hospital chaplain, and another woman was abused after Whelan had been suspended as a priest, then reinstated.

Geelong priest Kevin Dillon, an experienced chaplain, concedes that in the 1970s abusive priests sometimes ended up as hospital chaplains. ''In the '70s we thought the priest is ordained for ever, so what do you do with someone who runs off the rails? It wasn't so much hiding someone away as putting them out of harm's way,'' he says.

''I do a lot of hospital work myself. One of the things I'm conscious of is that people in hospital are very vulnerable. They depend on total strangers, their identities have to be left at the door.''

Wood was certainly vulnerable when she was admitted to the Mercy Hospital in April 1978. Jesuit priest Herbert Balding, the chaplain, became a constant visitor.

''After three or four nights I was aware that he was groping me. He'd come in under the pretext of saying prayers, and I was in bed, exhausted and medicated. I remember being embarrassed because I couldn't stay awake while he was praying, then I came to with his hands under the bedclothes, touching me up. That would be a nightly occurrence, mauling my breasts.''

Nearly caught when a nurse barged in, Balding began putting a chair in front of the door. ''Because I was anorexic, the nuns would encourage him to come and get me to eat. I was there for eight weeks - he had a field day. He was in my room so consistently one of the nurses asked me 'are they trying to make you a nun?'

''I was reared to believe a priest was God on earth, so I thought, 'it's not happening'. The way I handled it was total denial; it was too traumatic.''

One day, when a nurse was taking Wood for a walk, Balding came out from his hospital unit. ''He came out in a tracksuit, and I remember being amused because I'd never seen a priest in civvies. He invited me in for a cup of tea and told the nurse he would look after me and bring me back. He was almost like an animal, grabbing me. With the tracksuit he didn't have any undies. He raped me.''

She says the groping continued throughout her stay, dozens of digital rapes. She believes the hospital authorities suspected something was wrong because they dropped a lawsuit against her for an unpaid bill the day before it went to court.

AFTER she was discharged, Wood says, Balding would come to her house on his motorbike and abuse her when her husband had gone to work and her children to school. On his day off he would drive her up to Belgrave and molest her in his car.

''Balding was presenting as my rescuer. Apart from the abuse, he was kindly and comforting. At least there was someone listening to me. I was on this merry-go-round and didn't know how to get off.''

She made her first suicide attempt in August of that year and was sent to the Melbourne Clinic - the first of 10 admissions over the next four years.

Meanwhile, Balding was moved to the Jesuit centre at Sevenhill in South Australia, where he wrote to her that the ''shrinks are not doing you any good. It's time to put yourself into the hands of your darling Dr Bert''.

Somehow, he persuaded her husband and her psychiatrist that she needed a holiday, and he arranged for her to come to Sevenhill, where he would try to have sex with her while the other Jesuits said Mass next door.

After Wood's husband, suspicious by now, complained to the police and the Melbourne vicar-general, Balding was sent to Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory in 1979. From there he rang her so often that the bishop queried the phone bill, Wood says, while she got sicker and sicker. In 1983, he returned to Melbourne as emergency chaplain at St Vincent's and wanted to resume his relationship with Wood, who had separated from her husband. She refused.

In 1987, a friend suggested another Melbourne Jesuit priest as someone she could talk to. She met the priest - who she now calls an opportunistic predator - in his room at the Jesuits' house in Parkville. After a long conversation, she says he kissed her on her mouth.

Wood says she threatened another suicide attempt, so the Jesuit arranged for her to stay with his mother. It was New Year's Eve, and the mother went out to visit friends, leaving the priest to look after her.

''All his talk was of a sexual nature. He was using f--- and worse. I'm not stupid, I know when a guy's getting revved up. He's telling me about his ejaculations and drinking. He pushes me against the wall and tells me in explicit language what he'd like to do to me. But when someone walks past the unit he jumps away.

''He told me the only reason he didn't do what he wanted was because 'it would look as if every f---ing Jesuit was f---ing me'.''

Later, when Wood asked him why he behaved like that, she says he told her he had to stop her ''coming on'' to him - he had to speak that way as a form of shock treatment.

Only in 1993, when abuse advocacy group Broken Rites was formed, did Wood learn that Balding's behaviour was criminal. She complained to the police, but Balding died while they were investigating.

In 1996, then Melbourne archbishop George Pell set up the Melbourne Response for abuse victims, and the next year independent commissioner Peter O'Callaghan, QC, found that Wood had been abused by Balding. Meanwhile, she had seen several other solicitors in her quest for justice.

One, David Forster, served a writ on the Jesuits as a tactic to pressure them to settle, but when they did not Wood says he abandoned her. He told her he would not represent her, but if she gave him $1500 he would tell her how to conduct the case in court. She could not, and the case collapsed, with her owing the Jesuits $15,000 in costs.

At this point, her new solicitor, Meta McAllester, sought advice from barrister Tim Tobin, SC, about the second abuser. Tobin's written advice was that on the evidence he had, Wood would not win a civil case, and he explained this to Wood and McAllester at a meeting on December 7, 1999.

Wood says she rang him a few days later, saying she was terrified she would lose her house, and he said he would see what he could do, possibly even securing her a small settlement.

Wood says she did not hear from him again, despite ringing several times. But in July 2000, retrieving her file from a further solicitor to try yet another, she noticed a settlement lodged in the County Court on December 20, 1999.

Signed by Tobin, it agreed that the Jesuits would not pursue their $15,000 in costs and she would accept that as final settlement of the second abuse claim.

Wood was stunned. She says she never saw the settlement, and would never have agreed to it. Tobin, who met Wood in his chambers (with The Age) in April to see if between them they could reconstruct events, has no memory of being instructed for the settlement, or of negotiating it, though he accepts he signed it on Wood's behalf. He is adamant that he would not have signed it without instructions, that he would have no reason to and every reason not, as it would be professional misconduct.

The Jesuits apologised in 2003 for the abuse by Balding and paid Wood compensation (the Melbourne archdiocese also paid a much smaller sum because Balding had been its responsibility as chaplain) but declined to discuss the second case on the grounds it has been finalised.

Not surprisingly, this doesn't satisfy Wood, who has questioned provincial (Jesuit leader) after provincial, especially after one, Mark Raper, said in 2002 that the order would not hide behind legalities. But Wood claims that the new provincial, Steve Curtin, hung up on her recently.

According to Curtin, ''Noreen Wood was most certainly heard and treated by us at all times with the greatest respect.'' He also says the second priest against whom she made allegations consistently denied them, and that the matter was concluded with the 1999 settlement.

Wood says that in working through the various church protocols, ''you are revictimised and abused. You have no advocate. [Independent commissioner Peter] O'Callaghan never took any evidence and never put anything to me, and nothing was tested. You can imagine how shameful I feel, what an idiot.

''O'Callaghan kept saying to me, what's your complaint, I found in your favour. But I said, it's not the truth. I just want the truth to come out. You can't take the truth from me, and if there's a God he knows the truth. I can put my head on the pillow at night.''