Facing Cultural Brokenness
Aug. 29th, 2018 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI was going to let this percolate a while before putting anything down, as there are lots of things to think about and connections that can't be made in an immediate response, but I think holding it in is adversely affecting my health, so all plans are off. Here goes.
The Ghosts of St Joseph's Catholic Orphanage
TL;DR: Basically every orphanage horror story you can think of, in this case at an institution in Vermont run by the Sisters of Providence, with a dash of clerical sexual abuse, which is all the rage these days. The frame story is a group of orphanage survivors taking the Church to court over what happened there, and their long frustrating legal battle, but the history of the place is laid out in flashbacks and testimony.
Part of the reason I finally clicked that link was that the sample image embedded with the preview on Twitter. It's of a nun in a habit with a big padded wimple, showing a group of happy children the new elevator. I recognised that wimple – it appears in an old family group photo, taken, I think, when my mother was about 5. It was my job to dust, and one bookcase was covered in old photos, so I saw it every week. I know I was told multiple times who it was but I don't remember now; I think it must have been my grandmother's sister, of which more later. I'd forgotten it until seeing this link.
The article reads like a season finale of Law & Order: SVU (the cinematic effect they achieve with formatting text deserves an award, in my opinion, though it is emotionally leading), interspersing flashbacks with historical and modern interviews, with the constant underlying mystery of an electrocuted boy stringing it all together, underneath. But for me there was another unifying thread: The style of child-rearing described at St Joseph's sounded a lot like what I've gathered of my mum's family, albeit more extreme than anything she's told me, and it was with no surprise at all that I learned, deep into the article, that a lot of the nuns were from Quebec.
My mum's family is about as French-Canadian as you can get. The first one arrived from Rouen in 1633, and we've got both Quebecois and Acadian branches. Nouvelle France, founded under Louis the Sun King, was lost to the British in 1759, but compared to their genocidal ambitions elsewhere, the British were mostly hands-off rulers, with the exception of kicking everyone off Acadie to make it Nova Scotia. They imposed British law, and the people in high places were all appointed by Westminster, so if you hoped to get anywhere, you had to speak English. But most of the population wasn't trying to get anywhere, they just wanted to hold on to their farms and scratch a living from the cold stony ground.
Having been severed from France a few decades earlier, the French Revolution didn't touch Nouvelle France. I don't know if anyone set themselves up as an aristocracy in the new world, but if they did, they were relatively humble. No, the force keeping an iron lid on the populace in French Canada was the Catholic Church. They were, in effect, the government, at least the government that people dealt with in everyday life. They provided education, social services, and an economic safety net, and in return had the people by the short and curlies. If you wanted to get on the other side of the lid, you didn't learn English and work your way up politically – no one would accept you anyway – you joined The Party, as a priest or a nun, and a comfortable life and modicum of power were yours. I suspect the reason Britain largely left Quebec to itself was because, like in India, the existing socio-religious structures were keeping the populace in line perfectly well already.
In France, the people realised the aristocrats weren't gods, and brought them down. But what do you do when the people keeping you down are representatives of God Almighty Himself? Challenging them would be the utmost heresy. And then, when your harvest fails, who will feed you? Will you be buried with your ancestors in sanctified ground? Who will teach your children? The Church was a valued buffer between the people and the colonial administration. And when you challenge “the system”, you're challenging Uncle Jules the priest and your sweet gentle sickly cousin whose life is only made possible by the convent she joined. How heartless can you be? Better to turn that frustration on les bâtards anglaises. Salauds!
Quebec did eventually turn its back on the Church, to a large extent, in the 1960s, perhaps not coincidentally around the time the Canadian government set up the sort of support structures that had hitherto been ecclesial territory. But by this point, my family was out in the prairies, where they maintained those good old-fashioned traditional values uninterrupted. Growing up in Quebec in the '30s, my grandfather was bright, a good draughtsman, and poor; in Grade 8 he wanted to continue his schooling and become an engineer, so his family petitioned the Church for a scholarship. Sure, you can have a scholarship, they said, if you're going to seminary. Anything else, and tough luck. He went west.
Out there, he met my grandmother, one of eleven children on a farm in Saskatchewan. Big families were the norm: the more children you had, the more free farm labour. The priest would expect a baptism every 18 months and chide you if you didn't deliver. As a woman in French Canada, you had two options: 1. Get married young and pop out worker bees for the whole of your reproductive life, or 2. Become a nun. My grandmother's sister was the family favourite; she was academic and hard-working, and everyone was so proud when she took her vows. My grandmother, taken off the farm to be a trucker's wife in the suburbs, only had five children. Having been in her sister's shadow through childhood, and then abused by her husband, she sacrificed so much of herself that, by the time I knew her, she was hardly a person at all. I have no idea if she had a sense of humour or what her interests were beyond, apparently, praying. I'm sure her story was not unique. Presented with this alternative, of course Holy Orders was going to be flooded with young women whose hearts may not have been on fire for Jesus, but were adamant to escape stressful homes, with unhealthy ideas about love and sex, and who had been conditioned to expect abuse as a part of everyday life. Then, having fled parenthood themselves, they get put in charge of children and, as most people do, raise them how they were raised, in this case with corporal punishment and a lack of patience or mercy. How do you show love to someone when you never saw it yourself? When your values system elevates stoicism and discipline above all else?
So much of what I read in that article reminded me of stories my mum told about how hard things were growing up. At the time they seemed like “barefoot in the snow uphill both ways” stories, but as I've gained adult perspective and learned a bit more, there are hard truths there. The stories from the orphanage are far more extreme than what I knew happened in prairie farmhouses, but then children in an orphanage are depersonalised, so why shouldn't they be? It's the same pattern, just turned up to 11.
I was very glad that, towards the end of the article, you get the interview with the nun, as it opened the door on the background understanding that was clamouring in my head while I was reading it. Her story is so much like so many in my family, and probably many families. I hope that section doesn't get overlooked by the outrage readers. What happened at the orphanage is an extension of what was happening in many homes. That it went unchallenged is the real crime, but its existence is not down to something rotten in the Church itself (beyond the truism that power corrupts) but from the soil in which it grows and draws its people.
My mum came of age in the 70s, and left her oppressive family to have a career, eventually moving almost as far away from them as possible. We would visit, but it would be a whistle-stop tour of prairie cities crammed into a week or two and then we were gone again. I always wondered why someone who professed to love family so much would do this. I think I understand now. Her efforts to divorce us from that legacy paid off enormously. For much of my adult life I've tried to reconnect with some sense of Quebecois continuity – these are the people I look like, they gave me half my DNA, that's my history, but I can't speak the language and I know almost nothing about the wider culture. It's almost as though I'm adopted and trying to find out where I came from. But finding out is a mixed bag, and while I'm assured that the branch of the family that remained in Quebec is now full of warm caring people, I haven't met them, and for the time being I am becoming more grateful to have been adopted out.
Despite all best efforts, that brokenness still hasn't completely washed out – I don't know if it could, in one generation. The quote with which I lead this post jumped out at me when I read it, as that was a constant refrain in my house, along with “mind over matter.” Ignore the problem and it will go away. It will only bother you if you let it. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. The sort of platitudes that girded a generation of young men to get blown up in the mud of Flanders. In this case the “cry and you cry alone” line came mostly from my dad, whose family background is proof that French Canadians don't have a monopoly on frigid authoritarianism. I hadn't thought of that line since I was a teenager, then here it was, unpacked in plain text.
Well, my friends, maybe my polar obsession comes down to this: There were wonderful people in the world, who were good to each other and not cruel. They died being good to each other, and that makes me cry. And dammit, you're all gonna cry with me.
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.Yesterday on Twitter was one of those days where you keep getting the same long-read link from unrelated people on your timeline. I usually try to avoid these, as they're time sinks which only add to the sense of global despair, but after enough iterations I finally clicked on the link. I provide it here for you if you're interested: it took me nearly three hours to read (with occasional breaks; I suggest breaks) so do be advised what you're getting into before crossing that threshold.
TL;DR: Basically every orphanage horror story you can think of, in this case at an institution in Vermont run by the Sisters of Providence, with a dash of clerical sexual abuse, which is all the rage these days. The frame story is a group of orphanage survivors taking the Church to court over what happened there, and their long frustrating legal battle, but the history of the place is laid out in flashbacks and testimony.
Part of the reason I finally clicked that link was that the sample image embedded with the preview on Twitter. It's of a nun in a habit with a big padded wimple, showing a group of happy children the new elevator. I recognised that wimple – it appears in an old family group photo, taken, I think, when my mother was about 5. It was my job to dust, and one bookcase was covered in old photos, so I saw it every week. I know I was told multiple times who it was but I don't remember now; I think it must have been my grandmother's sister, of which more later. I'd forgotten it until seeing this link.
The article reads like a season finale of Law & Order: SVU (the cinematic effect they achieve with formatting text deserves an award, in my opinion, though it is emotionally leading), interspersing flashbacks with historical and modern interviews, with the constant underlying mystery of an electrocuted boy stringing it all together, underneath. But for me there was another unifying thread: The style of child-rearing described at St Joseph's sounded a lot like what I've gathered of my mum's family, albeit more extreme than anything she's told me, and it was with no surprise at all that I learned, deep into the article, that a lot of the nuns were from Quebec.
My mum's family is about as French-Canadian as you can get. The first one arrived from Rouen in 1633, and we've got both Quebecois and Acadian branches. Nouvelle France, founded under Louis the Sun King, was lost to the British in 1759, but compared to their genocidal ambitions elsewhere, the British were mostly hands-off rulers, with the exception of kicking everyone off Acadie to make it Nova Scotia. They imposed British law, and the people in high places were all appointed by Westminster, so if you hoped to get anywhere, you had to speak English. But most of the population wasn't trying to get anywhere, they just wanted to hold on to their farms and scratch a living from the cold stony ground.
Having been severed from France a few decades earlier, the French Revolution didn't touch Nouvelle France. I don't know if anyone set themselves up as an aristocracy in the new world, but if they did, they were relatively humble. No, the force keeping an iron lid on the populace in French Canada was the Catholic Church. They were, in effect, the government, at least the government that people dealt with in everyday life. They provided education, social services, and an economic safety net, and in return had the people by the short and curlies. If you wanted to get on the other side of the lid, you didn't learn English and work your way up politically – no one would accept you anyway – you joined The Party, as a priest or a nun, and a comfortable life and modicum of power were yours. I suspect the reason Britain largely left Quebec to itself was because, like in India, the existing socio-religious structures were keeping the populace in line perfectly well already.
In France, the people realised the aristocrats weren't gods, and brought them down. But what do you do when the people keeping you down are representatives of God Almighty Himself? Challenging them would be the utmost heresy. And then, when your harvest fails, who will feed you? Will you be buried with your ancestors in sanctified ground? Who will teach your children? The Church was a valued buffer between the people and the colonial administration. And when you challenge “the system”, you're challenging Uncle Jules the priest and your sweet gentle sickly cousin whose life is only made possible by the convent she joined. How heartless can you be? Better to turn that frustration on les bâtards anglaises. Salauds!
Quebec did eventually turn its back on the Church, to a large extent, in the 1960s, perhaps not coincidentally around the time the Canadian government set up the sort of support structures that had hitherto been ecclesial territory. But by this point, my family was out in the prairies, where they maintained those good old-fashioned traditional values uninterrupted. Growing up in Quebec in the '30s, my grandfather was bright, a good draughtsman, and poor; in Grade 8 he wanted to continue his schooling and become an engineer, so his family petitioned the Church for a scholarship. Sure, you can have a scholarship, they said, if you're going to seminary. Anything else, and tough luck. He went west.
Out there, he met my grandmother, one of eleven children on a farm in Saskatchewan. Big families were the norm: the more children you had, the more free farm labour. The priest would expect a baptism every 18 months and chide you if you didn't deliver. As a woman in French Canada, you had two options: 1. Get married young and pop out worker bees for the whole of your reproductive life, or 2. Become a nun. My grandmother's sister was the family favourite; she was academic and hard-working, and everyone was so proud when she took her vows. My grandmother, taken off the farm to be a trucker's wife in the suburbs, only had five children. Having been in her sister's shadow through childhood, and then abused by her husband, she sacrificed so much of herself that, by the time I knew her, she was hardly a person at all. I have no idea if she had a sense of humour or what her interests were beyond, apparently, praying. I'm sure her story was not unique. Presented with this alternative, of course Holy Orders was going to be flooded with young women whose hearts may not have been on fire for Jesus, but were adamant to escape stressful homes, with unhealthy ideas about love and sex, and who had been conditioned to expect abuse as a part of everyday life. Then, having fled parenthood themselves, they get put in charge of children and, as most people do, raise them how they were raised, in this case with corporal punishment and a lack of patience or mercy. How do you show love to someone when you never saw it yourself? When your values system elevates stoicism and discipline above all else?
So much of what I read in that article reminded me of stories my mum told about how hard things were growing up. At the time they seemed like “barefoot in the snow uphill both ways” stories, but as I've gained adult perspective and learned a bit more, there are hard truths there. The stories from the orphanage are far more extreme than what I knew happened in prairie farmhouses, but then children in an orphanage are depersonalised, so why shouldn't they be? It's the same pattern, just turned up to 11.
I was very glad that, towards the end of the article, you get the interview with the nun, as it opened the door on the background understanding that was clamouring in my head while I was reading it. Her story is so much like so many in my family, and probably many families. I hope that section doesn't get overlooked by the outrage readers. What happened at the orphanage is an extension of what was happening in many homes. That it went unchallenged is the real crime, but its existence is not down to something rotten in the Church itself (beyond the truism that power corrupts) but from the soil in which it grows and draws its people.
My mum came of age in the 70s, and left her oppressive family to have a career, eventually moving almost as far away from them as possible. We would visit, but it would be a whistle-stop tour of prairie cities crammed into a week or two and then we were gone again. I always wondered why someone who professed to love family so much would do this. I think I understand now. Her efforts to divorce us from that legacy paid off enormously. For much of my adult life I've tried to reconnect with some sense of Quebecois continuity – these are the people I look like, they gave me half my DNA, that's my history, but I can't speak the language and I know almost nothing about the wider culture. It's almost as though I'm adopted and trying to find out where I came from. But finding out is a mixed bag, and while I'm assured that the branch of the family that remained in Quebec is now full of warm caring people, I haven't met them, and for the time being I am becoming more grateful to have been adopted out.
Despite all best efforts, that brokenness still hasn't completely washed out – I don't know if it could, in one generation. The quote with which I lead this post jumped out at me when I read it, as that was a constant refrain in my house, along with “mind over matter.” Ignore the problem and it will go away. It will only bother you if you let it. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. The sort of platitudes that girded a generation of young men to get blown up in the mud of Flanders. In this case the “cry and you cry alone” line came mostly from my dad, whose family background is proof that French Canadians don't have a monopoly on frigid authoritarianism. I hadn't thought of that line since I was a teenager, then here it was, unpacked in plain text.
Well, my friends, maybe my polar obsession comes down to this: There were wonderful people in the world, who were good to each other and not cruel. They died being good to each other, and that makes me cry. And dammit, you're all gonna cry with me.
*witnessing*
Date: 2020-05-12 07:24 pm (UTC)Yes.
Re: *witnessing*
Date: 2020-05-13 10:16 am (UTC)