Hidden Horrors in Halls of Learning

By Ryan Osland
Macedon Ranges Weekly
September 2, 2012

http://www.macedonrangesweekly.com.au/news/national/national/general/hidden-horrors-in-halls-of-learning/2657148.aspx

St Pius X College.

It jarred to read again that a judge had described my old high school in the 1970s as a "brutal and frightening place, with an atmosphere of violence".

This was St Pius X College, then a Catholic boys school, in the Newcastle suburb of Adamstown. I had attended St Pius X from 1963 until my Higher School Certificate year, 1968, and in the 1970s my late mother was secretary to successive principals and I knew members of staff. Some were frequent visitors to my mother's home.

In 2010, the District Court judge Helen Syme described the living hell of abuse and sadism faced by St Pius X students. On Thursday last week the former St Pius X principal, Father Tom Brennan, 74, became the first Australian Catholic priest to be charged with concealing the alleged sex crimes of another priest.

He has also been charged with assaulting two boys by caning them when they complained of being allegedly sexually assaulted by teacher John Sidney Denham.

Mr Denham, now 70, was a Catholic priest and teacher at the school from 1975. He currently faces charges over 10 counts of alleged sexual assault.

Father Brennan also faces eight counts of sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy at Corpus Christi church in the Newcastle suburb of Waratah in 1984 and 1985.

There have been 11 deaths by suicide or drug overdose of men who had been students at St Pius X, the most recent being a 45-year-old father of two who took his own life on July 22. He left his family a note saying he was in "too much pain" after decades of torment.

Brennan joined the St Pius X staff in 1963 and was my class master in what was then first form and is now known as year seven. Brennan and his late predecessor, Father Patrick Helferty, were my mother's bosses. She greatly admired them and they remained friends long after my mother left the school's clerical staff in the mid-1970s.

St Pius X College began life in 1959 when it became Newcastle's second Catholic boys high school, created to receive the overflow from the huge Marist Brothers Hamilton (now St Francis Xavier College). In 1961 St Pius X moved from cramped quarters at Tighes Hill to the present site at Adamstown. The building was the former Lustre hosiery factory.

The fledgling school was seen very much as a poor relation to the established Marist Brothers. Of the students who were the first to sit a public examination, the old Intermediate Certificate, 10 per cent passed. It was a forlorn start and the school was the subject of much ridicule.

In an experiment thought to be unique, St Pius X was staffed by secular priests from the Maitland diocese. Many of these men were reluctant recruits. Though mostly well-educated, most if not all the priests were not trained to teach. They had entered the priesthood to provide pastoral care in the parishes, not to educate teenage boys.

Catholic schools were traditionally staffed by priests, brothers or nuns who were members of a particular order and who were generally trained to teach. While celibate, secular priests did not take a vow of poverty and were generally more worldly than their cloistered fellow clerics.

Brennan, a slim, strikingly handsome non-drinker (he and his friend Helferty were badge-wearing members of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, for Catholic priests), was a first-grade referee in the strong Northern NSW Soccer Federation competition.

The most famous member of staff was the young Father John Cootes, who came to the school in 1968 already a rugby league star and who went on to become the first Catholic priest to represent Australia.

Ironically, my parents sent me to St Pius X because they were discouraged by Marist Brothers' reputation for harsh discipline. A particularly brutal Marist Brother later left the order and turned up at St Pius X as one of the school's early lay teachers. In 1968 my sixth form classmates complained to the then principal, Helferty, after seeing this teacher strike a first form boy so hard he fell to the ground. The complaint went unheeded.

While some priests eschewed corporal punishmentor administered it sparingly and often very half-heartedly, others were enthusiastic users of the cane.

Even to a teenager, it was apparent most of these men were inadequate teachers. Many were young and wrestling with their vows in a decade of huge social change. In growing numbers they left the priesthood, married and started families. The religious were eventually replaced by properly trained laity.

Memories of my Catholic schooling, both by nuns at the primary level and later by priests, generally aren't fond. There was too much institutionalised violence, largely directed at less fortunate pupils in a very ethnically diverse student body in industrial Newcastle.

But at least my time at St Pius X was free of the unspeakable horror for which the Catholic Church is yet to apologise. There was never any talk among my classmates of sexual impropriety by our teachers, most of whom were dedicated to giving us the best education they could. They were also generous with the time outside of school hours, providing extra tuition, counselling and sports coaching. My mother died last year never having known of the evil that existed at the school she loved.

David Knox is The Sun-Herald's assistant editor.

Footnote: Curiously heading the "Wall of Fame" on the now junior secondary co-ed school's website is the disgraced former Health Services Union president Michael Williamson who, it states, graduated in 1968.