When the Diocese of Burlington (Vermont) Got Caught Lying

I finally finished the book The Ghosts of the Orphanage by Christine Kenneally. It is a research book about a residential childcare business, St. Joeseph's Orphanage, in Burlington, VT. The facility operated for 120 years closing in 1974. It was owned by the Diocese of Burlington and staffed by a group called the Sisters of Providence. The book filled with recollections of old people who were in the facility as children was so painful to read I had to put it down for a few days often. It is a book with recollections of beatings, murders and lying by Catholic officials. 

I call it a residential facility because many of the children there at any moment had parents and extended families. The practice for more than a hundred years when a family badly needed to save some money, even money for food, they would place a child in such a facility. Sometimes a child would move back and forth between a facility and home. But the places went under the general term "orphanages" because some children's parents had died. I had personal knowledge of such places from my late friend Roy C Pedersen whom I knew in city politics. His father, a farmer, died young and his mother placed Roy in such a facility in Minnesota for a year or two because she was in desperate financial straits.

St. Joeseph's in Burlington, VT became known because children began to find each other decades later and recounted to each other their experiences of being beaten. Some had physical scars from the abuse. Then there were many accounts of sexual abuse by nuns and especially by the priests assigned by the Diocese to oversee the Sisters. While papers today are full of dioceses across the country admitting they protected priests who sexually abused children, the story of St. Joeseph's Orphanage is even more gripping because of the lying by contemporary clergy of the Diocese and by the Nuns who had worked in the facility who, for whatever reason, wanted to protect the Diocese and Sisters of Providence.

I'll mention briefly the book's author was focused on reported deaths of children in the facility. Several former children recalled seeing other children killed. One recalled seeing a girl kicked severely by a nun and died. Another saw one boy kill another boy. There was the story of a boy pushed off of a balcony and died. There were a couple of stories of children pushed off of boats who then drowned. While the author's efforts to establish who was killed by whom took up much of the book I want to discuss here the lying by clergy. 

For a few years about 2010, an attorney became interested in the stories at St. Joeseph. He spent countless months and expensive time bringing the Diocese and Sister to court. This, of course, was before the priest abuse scandals of the recent decade. 

The attorney brought the now old people before the court where they told their stories. The attorney defending the Sisters and the Diocese said these stories were hoaxes planted by the other attorney. Both the Sisters and the Diocese said they had examined their records and found no allegations of sexual abusee, beatings or inappropriate behavior of any kind. Eventually, the Diocese paid some small token to those who testified but admitted no fault and everyone moved on.

Eight or ten years later came the explosion of priests sexually abusing children. The State of Vermont ordered the Diocese and Sisters to hand over their personnel records. There were the children's stories confirmed in the Diocese's own papers by the lying clergy in the Diocese. For most of the 140 years St. Joeseph's the supervising clergy were men with records of sexual abuse. One would be transferred, another bad one would move in. Some Nuns of the Sisters were also moved around because of documented violence. 

It is a book that documents the dark side of the Catholic Church.