The Church and bad faith

Billy’s story

In Newfoundland, it has been 30 years since the Mount Cashel orphanage was closed. Those who lived there will never forget.

At least, those who survived.

Call my colleagues from the CBC in Saint-Jean, Newfoundland. I am told of a survivor. “You know you can’t treat this subject like any other. You will have to do useful work,” I was warned. Is that so?

So I call Billy Earle, who is in his fifties today. After two or three shots, he is the one who answers. I explain to him that I want to report on the crisis of pedophiles in the Church.

The orphanage where Billy arrived at the age of 8 was run by the Christian Brothers of Ireland congregation.

I should have known that I was opening a box of dirty memories.

It was the first time I spoke to Billy. Barely ten minutes had passed before I could already hear his sighs, short of breath, those moments when you can’t find the air to breathe and talk.

I don’t even know how I end my days.

The Mount Cashel Orphanage is the Ground Zero for Canadian Catholic pedophile scandals.

Billy still lives in Saint-Jean de Terre-Neuve, on an island of steep cliffs, whistling winds and wrathful sea. He comes from a family of seven children and parents in divorce. Three of them end up at the Mount Cashel orphanage.

The Christian Brothers of Ireland ran the orphanage with an iron fist.

Billy was barely 8 years old. He was beaten and sexually assaulted. Like her little brother Shane and so many other boys.

One evening, after being beaten, he and a friend fled the orphanage through the nearby cemetery. “We knew that the brothers would not come to fetch us from the cemetery,” he says.

The two boys will denounce what they are suffering, what they have seen. “The scale of the attacks was unimaginable …”

The police are investigating. Interrogations are carried out. Confessions are obtained.