Abuse in care inquiry: Survivors to tell of horrific abuse suffered at Christchurch Catholic school

Tuesday, 8 February 2022

Brian Uttinger, now 57, attended Marylands School in Christchurch from 1974 until 1980. He was 8 when he was first sent to the school and started being abused.

It was only Brian Uttinger’s second night at Marylands School when the abuse started. He was 8 at the time.

Brother Bernard McGrath called him into his bedroom and locked the door. McGrath told him to take off his clothes and lie on his bed.

When McGrath was done, he told Uttinger not to say anything to anybody because what he did was “perfectly normal and natural”.

In his young mind, Uttinger was uncertain if what McGrath had done was wrong but he knew “something wasn’t quite right”.

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In this photo, first published in 1980, Brother William Lebler speaks to a young Brian Uttinger after a special mass at Marylands School. Lebler was also subject to a raft of allegations of offending against boys in his care. Police fought to extradite him from Australia to New Zealand but he was found unfit to stand trial due to his diminished mental capacity.

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He was very scared and couldn’t stop shaking, which made him doubt that any part of what had just been done to him was “perfectly normal”.

That fear never subsided or disappeared.

Brian Uttinger, pictured in 2002, was abused for more than three years at Marylands School.

For three-and-a-half years it was always there, like a big knot in his stomach that pulled tighter every time he was called to McGrath’s room.

Uttinger, now 57, attended Marylands from 1974 until 1980. He was one of a number of boys abused at the Christchurch school, a residential facility for boys, including many with disabilities, that was run by the Hospitaller Order of the Brothers of St John of God from 1955 to 1984.

More than 530 boys attended the school during its 29-year existence. At least a quarter of them were placed there by the state.

Uttinger’s parents, who lived on a dairy farm outside Cambridge in the North Island, sent him to Marylands because of his learning difficulties and a diagnosis of autism. He only saw them when he went home during school holidays.

Uttinger attended the school for seven years but never told anyone about the abuse he was experiencing.

“I was worried that no-one would believe me. The brothers had an excellent reputation within the community, they were very much respected. I knew people would say that I was making it up.”

The abuse was not just sexual but also physical and emotional.

“McGrath loved to humiliate me in front of the other boys,” says Uttinger.

Former Catholic brother and convicted sex offender Bernard McGrath. (File photo)

He recalls one incident when McGrath was talking during a dormitory meeting and Uttinger “cracked up laughing because some of the things he said were just so ridiculous”.

McGrath made him stand up before kicking him in the stomach so forcefully that he fell on his back.

“On other occasions, he would pick me up by my ankles and drop me on my head. He did that quite regularly.”

A 1973 aerial image of Marylands School and St Joseph’s Orphanage in Christchurch.

When St John of God moved McGrath away from Marylands, the abuse stopped. But the trauma and psychological damage Uttinger suffered was lifelong.

Uttinger first disclosed the abuse he had suffered to police in the early 1990s when an investigation started into allegations about McGrath.

In 1993, McGrath was jailed for three years for abusing boys at Marylands and the Hebron Trust, a residential home for at-risk youths.

More complaints surfaced in 2002 and, after a trial in Christchurch in 2006, he was imprisoned for five years on 21 offences.

In February 2018, the then 70-year-old McGrath was jailed for 33 years by a court in Sydney on 64 offences against 12 boys.

McGrath was not the only one abusing children at Marylands, Hebron Trust and St Joseph’s Orphanage, which was located next door to Marylands School.

On Wednesday, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care will hear from several survivors about the abuse they suffered at these institutions.

The hearing, which will be held in Auckland, will run for six and a half days and will be live-streamed on the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry website.

It will include evidence given by the Catholic Archbishop of Christchurch, the Oceania head of the St John of God order, and Dr Michelle Mulvihill, a former nun and clinical psychologist who worked for the order from 1998 to 2007 to respond to sexual abuse claims.

Counsel assisting the royal commission, Katherine Anderson, said survivors would be sharing their experiences at the school where they suffered sexual, physical, emotional and educational abuse.

“Our inquiry has heard horrific experience after horrific experience of abuse inflicted by those within the church – the very people meant to care for them,” she said.

The royal commission, chaired by Judge Coral Shaw, is set to deliver its final report by June next year. Its interim report was released in December.

* An earlier version of this story stated that Bernard McGrath was a former Catholic priest. He was a Catholic brother. Amended at 10.15am, February 9, 2022.