When the child sex abuse royal commission’s hearing into the Marist Brothers concludes in Sydney on June 30, Commissioner Justice Jennifer Coate and her peers must decide if there was a culture of acceptance, complicity and cover-up within the order or if its leaders could possibly be as ignorant, naive and incompetent as they have said.
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Given Justice Coate repeatedly expressed amazement at claims by a succession of witnesses that they had not been aware sexual abuse against children was a criminal offence as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s the former outcome appears more likely.
A consistent theme among former Marist College principals, leaders of the order and senior Catholic Education Office officials called before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, in Canberra, in the past two weeks has been their inability to recall important meetings, dates and details of conversations.
Witnesses appeared to prefer to seem naive, ignorant and incompetent rather than have possibly condoned, then covered up, repeated offences by disgraced former Marist Brothers Kostka (aka John) Chute and Gregory Sutton over many decades.
One person who does not doubt the existence of a culture of acceptance and facilitation of child sexual abuse is the witness known only as AAJ.
The earliest of Chute's victims to give evidence, the 65-year-old readily admitted to being damaged goods. He was groomed and fondled by Chute at Marcellin College in Sydney in 1960 and has been battling the legacy of anger, humiliation and shame all his adult life.
A recovering alcoholic since 2009 his first marriage quickly failed. The commission also heard AAJ's current marriage has been on the rocks many times.
He has struggled to make a career as a teacher and says psychological fall-out from his abuse at Chute's hands prevented his finishing his honours year at Sydney University in 1970.
"I wanted to run away. I hopped on a Greyhound Bus in Sydney and arrived in Brisbane the next day. I had no money, no contacts, and no family and I lived in the people's palace [a hostel] there."
AAJ went to the Marist Brothers school at Ashgrove in an attempt to confront his nightmare past: "Brother Silverius answered the door. He was a brother who I'd had at Marcellin and he'd been my maths teacher in fourth year and fifth year of high school. I knew him quite well,” he said.
Brother Silverius quickly summed up the situation and went and got a young brother. He suggested AAJ and the young brother "do something together". That weekend they drove to the order's holiday house at Tugun on the Gold Coast. The young brother took AAJ upstairs to a room with a double bed in it and said: "This is where we sunbake naked".
"I've never really been sure about what he meant but I was very keen to get out of there," AAJ said. "He was clingy, he was touchy, he was everything that I was really nervous of."
What happened next was "really quite pathetic" AAJ said. "I think it just tells you something about what's going on inside the Marist Brothers. He insisted I take half a dozen postage stamps and he pleaded with me to please write to him."
AAJ, who said he "felt terrible for the young man because he was homesick", told the Commission the surreal interlude had been "a real eye-opener".
"It was like there was a penny dropping in my head. When you talk about institutional sex offences, you talk about young boys and you talk about what they're introduced to. I think in my mind [it] appears there was a culture [of] things [that] were acceptable that shouldn't have been.
"They weren't to be spoken about but were allowable and I've been wanting to say that for years."
AAJ, who briefly taught at a Marist Brothers school in New Zealand, said it had been apparent from conversations he overheard that the Marist Brothers had a long history of condoning the unacceptable and that while women were out of bounds boys were fair game. He said brothers had spoken of going to confession as “washing dirty water off their chests”.
While a succession of former principals and senior Marist Brothers and Catholic Church officials vehemently denied the existence of such a culture, some remarkable admissions during the eight days of testimony lend AAJ’s view some credence.
Brother Terence Heinrich, the principal of Canberra’s Marist College from 1983 to 1989, said last Thursday that calling the police after allegations of sex abuse against Chute in 1985 would have been out of the question. “We tried to manage them [complaints] privately, internally… I would [hardly] have ventured into talking to police about something as intimate as concerning a brother.”
Father Brian Lucas, the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, defended the practice of not taking notes during interviews with accused child molesters but acknowledged the practice has since ceased.
John Holdsworth, then a Marist Brother and principal of the Queensland school at which Gregory Sutton began his offending in the early 1970s, said he could not be sure he would have known adults could sexually abuse children and that this was a crime as late as 1989.
John Doyle, a senior teacher at Marist College Canberra in 1986, could not recall being told that year by Damian De Marco that he had been abused by Chute in 1981.
Brother Alexis Turton, who took the lead in handling complaints against both Sutton and Chute, was accused of shipping Sutton out of the country so he could not be questioned by police in 1989.
It appears the only occasions on which the Marist Brothers took decisive action against alleged abusers was when a third party became, or threatened to become, involved.
The first instance of this was in 1987 when Margaret O’Grady threatened media exposure if Sutton was not removed from St Carthage’s Primary School, in Lismore.
The second was when police began investigating Sutton in 1989 and he was sent to Canada.
The third was in 1993 when the ACT youth advocate was contacted over abuse by Chute at Marist College, Canberra. He was pulled from teaching in a matter of days.
Whatever the outcome of the commission’s deliberations, the Marist Brothers are now staring down the barrel of a number of crises as a result of the past two weeks.
Brother Alexis Turton may be open to a police investigation into whether or not he attempted to pervert the course of justice by sending Gregory Sutton to Canada in 1989 less than a week after officers began probing alleged abuse at St Thomas More Catholic Primary School.
CCI, the Marist Brothers' insurer, may have grounds for reviewing the payment of almost $9 million to Chute’s and Sutton’s victims. The hearing was told that if the Marist Brothers had earlier knowledge that the two men posed a risk to children CCI could be entitled to ask for its money back.
The commission was told the provincials (the leaders of the order) kept a tight lid on knowledge of offenders and did not share it with support staff, police, other civil authorities or even the headmasters of the schools to which the offenders were transferred when it got too hot for them where they were.
The result appears to have been a strong culture of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. Witness after witness either saw nothing, wasn't aware that what they saw was criminal or, when awareness could be pinned on them, believed their duty of care was fulfilled when they reported it to their superiors.
In short, the commission would seem to be well justified if it concludes there was a culture in place of not wanting to know; of not being willing to acknowledge the problem and of not being prepared to face up to it in a concrete way.
The human cost of this has been terrible in terms of suicides, shattered lives and, ultimately, a loss of respect for the Marist Brothers by the wider public.
This is likely to be reflected in a flood of additional compensation claims prompted by what has been unearthed to date.
Whether or not the Marist Brother’s insurers will cover them against such claims is the multi-million dollar question.
