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…