CANADA
The Telegram
Barb Sweet
Published on April 04, 2016
Catholic officials sat on one side of Courtroom No. 2 Monday at the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador while former Mount Cashel orphanage residents and their supporters sat on the benches across the aisle.
In the morning, the leads on two teams of lawyers outlined opposing arguments of whether the Roman Catholic Episcopal Corp. of St. John’s is liable for physical and sexual abuse of boys by members of the lay order Christian Brothers at the infamous orphanage from the 1940s to the 1960s.
And in late morning and all afternoon, the first of four men who will lay bare their experiences at this civil trial their life stories got to the unsettling descriptions of a childhood forever marked by his experiences with the Christian Brothers and a couple of employees at the orphanage.
The man cannot be named because of a publication ban in the John Doe case.
He told of grubs in daily rations of porridge, rat and mice droppings in bread and starved boys so desperate that they looked for scraps in a vat of swill collected from the leftovers of patients at city hospitals. That swill was meant for the pigs on the orphanage farm, but the boys would look for bits of meat and anything else edible.
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