CANADA
The Telegram
Civil trial moves to second former Mount Cashel Orphanage resident
One day in 1952, three brothers were playing pond hockey in their rural community far from St. John’s when their uncle came to get them to go to Mount Cashel.
“I felt terrible,” one of the boys, now a senior, told a courtroom of the experience of leaving his friends and schoolmates. “Never even had time to say goodbye.”
Terrible was also the word he used to describe his first impression of the now infamous east-end St. John’s orphanage run by the Catholic lay order Christian Brothers.
But, he said, his war-veteran father, a double amputee, could not care for them after their mother died.
When asked by abuse claimants’ lawyer Paul Kennedy why his father chose faraway Mount Cashel, the man replied people of that generation put clergy “on a pedestal.”
They were a Catholic family and clergy were viewed as doing no wrong, he said.
“That turned out to be different,” said the man, now in his 70s, who began testimony late Tuesday afternoon at the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador in a civil trial to determine whether the Episcopal Corp. of St. John’s is liable for the physical and sexual abuse of boys perpetrated by some members of the Christian Brothers several decades ago.
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