Don’t rock the boat: Under the ‘care’ of Marist brothers

Saturday, 17 August 2024

Andrew Johnstone is a Waikato man with a farming background.

OPINION: In my 6th form year at a Catholic boys’ college I witnessed an incident between a Brother and a group of boys that disturbed me enough to make a complaint. If I thought I was going to see some redress I was badly mistaken. The next day I was confronted by the Brother in question who raised a finger to my face and said “Mind your own business, boy”. It was threatening and I felt threatened.

I saw a lot in my four years under the ‘care’ of the Marists, including violence and sexual abuse. By this stage I was seeing the Brothers as two distinct groups, bad men and mediocre men - and by mediocre I mean men who probably knew what was going on but for reasons of institutional fealty did nothing about it.

I’d started my college years as a well behaved and polite boy but by the 6th form I’d become increasingly disdainful of the Brothers, which is how I ended up in the principal's office.

Brother Bosco (Kenneth Camden) was straightforward, “We don’t want boys like you at this school so don’t return for your 7th form year.” Ten years later Camden was jailed for sexual indecencies against two boys. I didn’t hear about this until 2022 when a friend brought it to my attention. I went online to find out more.

Camden had died in 2015 and the first thing I found was a glowing eulogy by senior Marist Richard Dunleavy, who for many years was the Marist charged with investigating abuse claims. Dunleavy also wrote the small but charged death notice I found on the school's website.

Considering the harm that Camden had wrought against boys known and unknown, I wondered at the appropriateness of this and emailed the school's principal asking him to take it down. His response - “I don’t see what the problem is?” I got the same reply from the school’s marketing and communications manager and no response at all from the school board.

After many months of emailing and phoning I did eventually get an answer from a senior Marist Brother who expressed his “disappointment” at what had gone on at the college. I asked him for an interview and he agreed as long as I didn’t “badger” him about the abuse.

Leaving it to the very end of the interview I took my chance, putting it to him that some Marist Brothers were simply bad men. He wondered if anyone was really all bad including Adolf Hitler. “Would Eva Braun have married him if she hadn’t seen something good in him?”

It was a perplexing answer but unsurprising. Religious institutions have responded to decades of institutionalised abuse with the same sort of tone deafness as my old school and, as for the Marists, until they were called to account by the Government, they were obstructive denialists more concerned at protecting themselves than addressing the harm they had wrought.

Not that the State is any sort of example. Long after all our sister societies had faced up to their own iniquities and failures, successive NZ governments have purposefully sidestepped the issue.

Why? A friend suggested that beneath our reputation as a forward-thinking progressive nation lies a dark heart that we are loath to acknowledge and, considering our small population, the scale of our historic abuse is extraordinary. Always proud to be seen as a country that punches above our weight, we outdid ourselves in this particular field of endeavour.

The recently released Abuse in Care report tells us that upwards of 200,000 were woefully mistreated by doctors, nurses, bureaucrats, teachers, care-givers, elders, pastors, priests, nuns and brothers. By the police, the health service, the army - hardly any aspect of Kiwi life was exempt.

Authority was the problem. Back then we were a country that wheeled out phrases like “don’t rock the boat” as the stock response to anyone who dared question the status quo and our traditional deference to authority allowed those with power a free rein to behave as they saw fit.

The 1970s was the high water mark of those times and a lot has changed since. Our increasingly secular society has firmly shucked off the influence of the nation's religious institutions and all the bigotry and judgement that came with them. Modern Aotearoa/NZ with its enlightened laws, oversights and hard won perspectives is doing a lot better, but underlying problems persist.

Violence against women and children is endemic and our unwillingness to tackle the social and economic inequity that gives rise to so much social dysfunction is a stain on our character.

As for the churches… Their top-down authoritarian methods continue to allow the ‘insufficient’ power over the trusting and vulnerable and continuing stories of abuse in the evangelical and pentecostal sector in particular remind us that for some, little has changed.

Then there are the nation’s sporting organisations who, like the churches, tend toward authoritarianism. Reports of abuse, mistreatment and bullying are frequent and as for those who stand up and report the abuse, rather than being celebrated for their courage they are often publicly vilified by the organisations they represent.

All of this reminds us that despite the good work of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care, there is still a disconnect at work in our society.

After the longest time my old school eventually removed all references to Kenneth Camden from their website. The question is not why they took so long to do the right thing, but why they thought it was an appropriate thing to do in the first place.