ST. CATHARINES (ONTARIO, CANADA)
St. Catharines Standard
September 6, 2017
By Grant LaFleche
The wolf in priest’s clothing: Part 2 of 3
[See also Part 1: Living with Echo of Clergy Abuse. Both articles provide links to previous Standard stories about Grecco. See also the page devoted to Rev. Donald Grecco on Sylvia’s Site, with links and chronology.]
A note to readers: For a more than a decade, Catholic priest Donald Grecco sexually abused children in Niagara. On Thursday, he will be sentenced for the abuse of three boys in the 1970s and 80s. This three part series is the story of one of his victims. Be advised this story contains language that might upset some readers.
It was the smell. It clung to everything. His hair. His clothes. His skin. It seemed to lurk inside his nostrils.
In the halls of St. John’s Training School for Boys, decorated with images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, that stench was the telltale sign that someone had been in Brother Bernard’s room.
It was the stench of rape.
“I will never forget that smell. Even now, just talking about it, I can smell it. I cannot really describe it. I don’t know what he was burning in there. Incense or something. I don’t know. But you couldn’t get it off you,” says William (Sully) O’Sullivan of St. Catharines ,who was incarcerated at the Uxbridge school in 1986 and 1987. “It was such a strong, distinctive smell that if another kid walked by, you knew he had been to see Brother Bernard. And you’d think ‘Oh, did he just get it, too?’”
As a 16-year-old, O’Sullivan spent 18 months in the St. John’s school, an all-boys reformatory school run by the De La Salle Brothers of the Christian Schools.
Backed by Queen’s Park, the school opened in 1956 and the Brothers, who also ran St. Joseph’s Training School for Boys in Alfred, Ont., were to take truants, trouble makers and teens with records and set them on a better path.
“They walked in there and thought they thought this was going to be heaven,” says Darcy Henton, an investigative journalist who wrote extensively about St. John’s and St. Joseph’s and published the book Boys Don’t Cry in 1995 about the sexual abuse scandal.
“They saw the beautiful stained glass windows and the terrazzo tile floors, and they thought this was going to be heaven, and it turned out to be hell.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.