Orphans Who Weren't Recall Care That Wasn't

Orphans Who Weren’t Recall Care That Wasn't
Anthony DePalma, New York Times
March 5, 1999

MONTREAL — Down by the St. Lawrence River, in the parish hall behind the somber stone church of St. Peter the Apostle, Hervé Bertrand and other French Canadian Catholics gathered recently to condemn the church that has so thoroughly shaped most aspects of life in the province of Quebec.

“I don’t have any problem with their God,” Bertrand said. “But I’ve got big problems with the people who made the decision that did this to me.”

Bertrand is now a 56-year-old plumber from a Montreal suburb with a wife and three grown children. He is one of about 3,000 French Canadians known as the “Duplessis orphans” because they were institutionalized in the 1940s and '50s when Maurice Duplessis was the iron-willed premier of Quebec.

About 300 of the orphans have formed a committee and are demanding an apology and restitution from the Catholic Church and the Quebec government for the way they were treated, and some say physically and sexually abused, when they were unjustifiably placed in mental institutions as children. Bertrand says employees at the institution where he was kept for eight years sexually assaulted him more than 30 times, the last in an elevator while he was in a straitjacket.

Most of the “Duplessis orphans” were not orphans at all. Like Bertrand, they had been born out of wedlock at a time when conservative Catholic sentiments made it wise to keep such transgressions secret. Many illegitimate children were raised in orphanages run by Roman Catholic nuns.

The Duplessis government worked hand in hand with the Catholic Church. When federal money became available for health care, but not education, the government encouraged the religious order to transform their orphanages into mental institutions.

“Quite simply, it was more profitable for the Quebec government and the church to warehouse psychiatric patients than to take care of normal children, so they struck a dirty deal,” said Rodrigue Vienneau, who's wife, Clarina Duguay, had been declared mentally incompetent and kept in a church-run institution after her mother became sick and her father, a woodsman, was unable to care for his five children.

“When I was 11, they falsified my medical records and classified me as mentally deficient,” Mrs. Duguay said. Like many women in Quebec, she kept her maiden name after she married. “All around me there were real mental patients. They gave me plenty of pills, and I was sexually abused by the sisters who, at bath time, use to wash my breasts and then told me I could wash my back myself.”

Jean Gaudreau, a psychologist at the University of Montreal who visited one of the orphanages in 1961, said there is little doubt that children were unnecessarily institutionalized during that time. Tests conducted then showed, he said, that mental deficiencies were often caused by lack of stimulation, not mental illness.

While unable to prove any specific charges of abuse, a government ombudsman in 1997 documented the existence of as many as 3,000 Duplessis orphans. Without determining who was at fault, the ombudsman recommended that they be compensated.

On Thursday, Lucien Bouchard, the premier of Quebec, offered the orphans an apology, along with compensation worth the equivalent of about $2 million. But the committee rejected the offer, which come to about $670 for each orphan, and insisted on a full public inquiry.

As they fight for recognition and justice, the orphans are reminding other Quebecers of the enormous changes that have taken place in the province since the 1940s and ’50s.

“What Quebec has undergone is a major cultural trauma,” said J. Robert Choquette, a professor of Canadian religious history at the University of Ottawa.

The changes set off by Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s touched Catholics around the world, but few places felt it as deeply as Quebec.

“The church's dominance in Quebec was sweeping,” Choquette said.

A map of Quebec reflects that. From the names of rivers, to the names of many towns and villages, Quebec and the Catholic Church were inseparable. At its apogee in the 1940s, the church ran all schools, hospitals and social institutions, like the orphanages, with the direct consent of the government.

Duplessis’ death in 1959 coincided with an awakening of social awareness that ushered in enormous changes for religion and society and set off a conflict between tradition and modernism. “What the conflict produced is the classic definition of throwing out the baby with the bath water,” Choquette said.

Today, the small churches and grand cathedrals that once overflowed with the faithful on Sundays are sparsely attended. Quebec’s birth rate has dropped from one of the world’s highest to one of the lowest, in part because the use of contraceptives is now widely accepted and abortion is legal.

The province has gone from having one of the lowest rates of divorce — prohibited by the Catholic Church — to one of the highest. It has one of the lowest rates of marriage in Canada, and 53 percent of its children are born out of wedlock.

Even so, the church’s presence is virtually inescapable, so much so that when the orphans denounced the church, they did so in rented space at a parish community center.

A few weeks ago, some of the orphans, wearing straitjackets of the type they say were used on them as children, demonstrated in front of the Montreal offices of the head of the church in Quebec, Jean-Claude Cardinal Turcotte. They demanded an apology, a public inquiry and compensation.

The cardinal refused to meet the orphans, but he did say he did not believe that the nuns who ran the institutions, often under very difficult conditions, had systematically abused their patients.

“When they watch television and hear protesters claim they beat children, that is upsetting,” he told a local reporter.

Instead of issuing an apology, he challenged the “orphans” to prove they were abused.

Which is what Bertrand thought he was doing when he showed reporters medical records detailing injuries he said he suffered in the sexual assaults. That is why Mrs. Duguay produced her childhood medical records, which said that she was mentally deficient, even though she had no previous or subsequent history of mental illness.

Mrs. Dugay and her husband say that, while they live surrounded by the Catholic Church and its trappings, they do not attend services regularly anymore.

“My family was very religious,” Vienneau said. “There are two nuns on my mother’s side, and I was an altar boy for four years.” But the church that once brought him peace now only raises his ire.

“We would only go back to practicing and go back to what we learned as young children,” he said, “the day that the church will apologize for what they’ve done.”

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