Archdiocese in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, sells 43 properties to pay abuse compensation

The Archdiocese of San Juan de Newfoundland has sold 43 properties to pay for an economic agreement reached with victims of abuse at Mount Cashel boarding school, according to the report. The orphanage was run for more than a century by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. Over the decades, children sent there were subjected to beatings and sexual assaults, and the source says the abuses were also covered up by officials, politicians and the Newfoundland police.

Among the properties sold is the 167-year-old basilica cathedral of St. John the Baptist, described as a symbol of Catholicism in Newfoundland, which was sold for $2.3 million to a Catholic foundation. At least 12 other churches, the archbishop’s residence, schools, apartments, parochial halls and land were also put on sale. The properties are valued at more than $15 million, which the source says is not enough to cover all the compensation the archdiocese has been ordered to pay.

According to the account, in 1975 police interviewed several children from the orphanage after several complaints. The children reported physical and sexual assaults, and two religious reportedly confessed to those abuses. The source states that the case was then covered up by the church, the police and the justice system, and that confessed abusers were transferred to other dioceses in the country, where, it was later learned, they continued to commit assaults.

Serious investigation did not begin until 1989, when a commission was formed. Over two years, it heard the testimony of dozens of victims and witnesses. Its conclusions held that the victims should be compensated and that the Christian Brothers should have been prosecuted as early as 1975. The source reports that eleven members of the congregation were sentenced to terms of between four months and 11 years.

The Court of Appeal of Newfoundland and Labrador ruled in 2019 that the Archdiocese of San Juan de Newfoundland was directly responsible for the abuses at Mount Cashel. Although the school was managed by the Christian Brothers, the court found that the archdiocese had allowed and covered up abuses committed between the 1940s and 1960s. The court awarded $2 million to four victims, a decision the source says opened the door to a hundred more claims. Canada’s Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2021. The archdiocese’s sale of church buildings is described as the latest step in a process that has lasted decades, and Archbishop Peter Hundt has acknowledged that 70 other properties will be put up for sale to meet payments (Proverbs 11:1, a call to honest dealing in the handling of obligations owed to those harmed).

Some of the churches have been acquired by Catholic groups and foundations that intend to keep using them for worship, though not all of them will remain religious sites. Residents of some affected communities, worried about being left without a place of worship, are organizing to raise funds to buy the properties. The source also notes that Mount Cashel was not the only institution where abuse occurred. It describes the Indigenous Residential Schools, also run by Christian churches, where thousands of children were separated from their families and pressured to abandon their native culture, and where many suffered severe physical and psychological abuse. The schools operated from the late 19th century into the 1990s as part of a program aimed at cultural integration of Indigenous people into the dominant white culture.

The source estimates that at least 6,000 children died as a result of these conditions, although the figure could reach 30,000, and describes the policy as an attempt at cultural genocide. Pope Francis asked forgiveness on Monday for the wrongs committed by many Christians against Indigenous peoples, who, he said, took part in “cultural destruction and forced assimilation.”

Source: Read the original report (translated from Spanish)