AUSTRALIA
The Courier-Mail
MICHAEL MADIGAN THE COURIER-MAIL APRIL 18, 2015
IT WAS Sister Emile who would clean him up and ensure he had a nappy for the bleeding after he would return, yet again, from being raped by the priest after the evening Mass.
The spirit of Sister Emile, whoever she was, flared briefly this week in the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse at Rockhampton.
It was the one point of light amid the medieval darkness that appears to have enveloped St Joseph’s Orphanage at Neerkol for much of the 20th century.
“Sister Regis” and “Sister Marcia’’ were given credence for being “nice’’ to children who were allegedly routinely slapped, flogged, starved, sodomised and ridiculed by nuns who would place dunce caps on their heads in this Christian refuge for orphans west of Rockhampton, now looming in the public mind as a charnel house of depravity.
But it was Sister Emile alone who honoured her vows of service to the poor and vulnerable, even if she wasn’t brave enough to stick her neck out and end the serial rape of young David Owen.
Millions of women have taken those solemn vows since Catherine McAuley, still on the Vatican’s slow track to sainthood, established the holy order of the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin in 1831.
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