AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
June 12, 2014
Brendan Long
Those thousands of Canberrans who have journeyed with Marist College these past 40 years, as students, parents or teachers, might ask themselves whether they really want to know what is being said in a little room in the Magistrates Court in Civic these past few days. That’s because it is genuinely confronting.
People like myself, who have been “streaming in” to much of the proceedings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse are witnesses to an arcane legal process, but one that still allows for people to have their say, to speak of their pain, to say what happened. There are times when I find myself reaching for the speaker volume controls to mute the feed – one can easily get overloaded – at other times you want to pump up the volume to hear every word.
It is obviously beyond painful for these men to tell their stories. I don’t think I am alone in the wide Marist community when I say that we, who were not victims, stand with those who were. We feel for them and with them, and in a lesser way of course, share their pain. These are brave men who have fought demons without, and demons within, to bring themselves to the point where they have the extreme courage required to speak in their own voice, before the nation, of their painful story. I admire them.
Like them I journeyed with the Marist experience at the time the abuse occurred, but for me, on the whole, it was a good place to be, a place of learning and a place in which my Catholic faith was nurtured well. But in the same halls, the same corridors, their experience was so starkly different. I think of the immense sacrifice parents made to pay for their children’s education, trusting the Marist Brothers with their most precious of possessions: the care of their boys. For the parents of the victims the despair must be beyond words.
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