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| Edward Hayes and his daughter |
While researching the article on the abuse and starvation of children by the Catholic nuns who ran the Irish Mother and Baby homes, I came across this news item. It makes a change from the tens of thousands of accounts of Catholic priests raping children.
This account is of a nun repeatedly raping a boy in her care and eventually getting herself pregnant by him.
According to this report in the Irish Mirror, Edward Hayes, 76, was abused for three years from the age of 12 at the former John Reynolds Home in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, in the 1950s. The home was run by nuns of The Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph.
However, the case is maybe not a straightforward case of a nun taking advantage of her position for her own sexual gratification since it seems that she too was a victim of institutionalised abuse at the hands of other Catholic nuns.
According to this report in the Express she had been forced to work in the laundry at the home in which she abused Edward. According to Edward, Sister Mary Conleth seemed obsessed with sex and started to abuse him soon after she arrived at the home in 1953, when he was aged 12. She would pull his trousers down and push him to the floor then lay on top of him. She threatened him that if he refused or told anyone he would get into trouble because what he had done was wrong.
The abuse continued for three years until she became pregnant and was sent away from the home.
Edward had assumed she had returned to Ireland where she had given birth to his child, but in fact she was sent to Guildford to give birth, then returned to Lytham St Annes before returning to Ireland where she left the order, resumed her real name, Bessie Veronica Lawler, and married, having four more children. She died in 2002.
Her baby daughter was adopted at birth but was sent at the age of four to live in a convent school in Chertsey, Surrey, The St John Bosco’s Convent Grammar School, run by Salesian nuns who trained her as a skivvy, to do their laundry, wait at table and do menial chores. And so the history of child-abuse continued. She was humiliated and kept separate from the girls who attended the boarding school because she was 'not one of them', and even made to wait on them at table. At break, and at the end of lessons, she was made to do chores.
The story of how Edward found his daughter and discovered the truth about his abuser is an interesting one and one which involved an enormous amount of luck. In 2010, after suffering from years of alcohol abuse, Edward sought help from a support group for people abused by clergy, MACSAS (Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors) and made contact with a volunteer trained psychologist Noel Chardon, who helped him come to terms with his abuse and seek compensation. Edward was eventually awarded £20,000 in compensation but most of it went on legal fees.
Noel helped Edward turn himself from a victim into a survivor. As part of the healing process, Edward decided to make his story public, believing his case was merely the tip of an iceberg.
Meanwhile, Bessie's children had started to research their family tree and had already discovered that she had had a child before marriage to their father, but had no idea who this child's father was until they read Edward's story and recognised the name of their mother. Edward Hayes finally met his 62 year-old daughter after Noel Chardon arranged a meeting. Despite making contact with Edward, they find it hard to come to terms with the knowledge that their mother was a paedophile rapist and have asked to remain anonymous, as has Edward's daughter.
This entire story, despite its happy ending, is entirely the product of institutional abuse in institutions run by Catholic nuns under the nominal supervision of the Catholic Church, which stems from a perverted view of human beings as sinners and unworthy products of sin. The worst of all sins, from a Catholic nun's point of view is sex, made even worse if it is sex outside marriage. No matter than the mother might have been the victim of abuse herself. The mother and her child are unworthy of respect and dignity as human beings and are condemned to a life of punishment and casual abuse.
Just as with priests, the false public perception of nuns as the epitome of love and compassion is the perfect cover for vindictive abuse, judgmentalism and hate. Tweet
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