I've never ever again seen a person like that. Could the nuns have been that indifferent to human life? Part of being human is being a sexual person humans are attracted to other people, have romantic feelings and sexual urges. But over the course of years I found that there was far more to discover. Robs father said he barely saw the statue because he couldnt take his eyes off the huge smile on his wifes face. A judge had allowed his sexual assault case to go forward, and he was proving himself to be a tenacious litigant, rallying others to the cause and even doing his own investigative work. No matter where they had come from, many of the children didnt know where they were going until the moment they turned around and discovered that whoever had brought them there was gone. And he was wearing a metal helmet? But Sallys falling boy was not the only story of a child who had been pushed from a window. In the United States, however, no such reckoning has taken place. When a cut under her fingernail developed into a throbbing, toxic infection, she had been too afraid to tell the nuns until it was almost too late. Im not going to relitigate the case, he said. They came across a chain-link fence with a hole in it. At a certain point, she said, the priest got up from his chair and forced himself on her. But it obviously didn't help. All along, the church had argued that if any abuse had taken place, it would have been the sole responsibility of the individual abuser not the mother superior, not the order of nuns, not Vermont Catholic Charities, and not the diocese. Irene showed her Sallys wounds. One of the heart-rending storylines of Paramount+'s Western series '1923' revolves around Teonna Rainwater, a Native American girl who gets tortured in a Catholic boarding school. The Children of Duplessis were considerably more organized than Widmans plaintiffs in Vermont. As a prosecutor in Newport, Vermont, and then as a private attorney, White had devoted his career to challenging and changing the prevailing wisdom about young victims of sexual abuse. As I really got older they used to make me babysit the real little ones in the nursery. He was cool and implacable for almost the entire 19 hours. It strained credulity to think that a nun would hold a childs head underwater, until you also heard about the nuns who covered babies mouths until they turned blue. Will you agree with me that a grown man, an elderly man, a priest, could pinch the behind of a little girl without it constituting. Questioning the churchs witnesses, he did his best to be gentle, friendly, the better to put them at ease. But a victory for the plaintiffs could have catastrophic effects for the diocese and for the church as a whole. Longales mother said a doctor at the hospital initially said that her son had injuries consistent with a bad blow or fall. But the assault and a subsequent advance by a different priest a year later eventually led her to stop going to confession with any priest other than her spiritual father, who lives in a different country. Like all her siblings, she helped her mother outside, regularly getting up at 3 a.m. to milk the cows. View of Lake Champlain out the window of the cupola at the orphanage. She is the author of two books: The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, and The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. She was about to move apartments, she said. Nuns.I. But for all these revelations including this months Pennsylvania grand jury report on how the church hid the crimes of hundreds of priests a darker history, the one to which Sallys story belongs, remains all but unknown. She said no, at first, then she said she knew of one such nun. We view with skepticism much of what youve described.. She was jumping on her feet. Hammons said she wasnt allowed to tell me the exact amount but it wasnt even enough to buy a secondhand car. The nuns made the girls lie on their side and face the same direction. But even though the investigations have been focused on the living, some of the 20th centurys missing children have begun to return anyway. Others recounted constant cruelty and physical abuse. Oh, another mishap? I got down, and I lapped up that vomit.. Other St. Josephs cases cropped up, too, as a few more orphans launched suits with different attorneys. Surely it had become more possible to imagine that a nun might say something untrue? MARTIN: But you felt that you couldn't speak up. Most government inquiries into the institutional abuse of children, including Australias various inquiries and Irelands Ryan Report, which dealt with abuse at the Artane residential school, have avoided investigating the deaths. We are going to have to do something about you, child. The facts were lost in the mists of time. Sally was still there to see what happened next: The nun reached through the window frame and shoved Patty hard. The first of those chaplains was Father Devoy, the one who Sally said pulled down her underpants. If you smile, the whole world smiles with you. Whenever a young client testified, White threw a party, with cake and balloons and streamers. She reminisced about the way Sally sang God Bless America and On the Good Ship Lollipop when she was little. Sexual favors are sometimes the payment they have to make for such help, the report said. The girl was sent to hospital, and weeks later, one of Williams other friends told her, the injured girl had died. Philip White was sitting in his large, third-floor law office one afternoon in 1993 when the mysterious caller arrived. Darkest of all, it is a history of children who entered orphanages but did not leave them alive. It was happening in Canada too. Sally recalled, still mystified, that sometimes in summer a nun would wake the children in the middle of the night because an ice cream truck had come by with leftovers. She had told someone else that she had been beaten and banished to a terrifying attic. But being taken seriously is often the toughest obstacle for sisters who are sexually abused, said Demasure, until recently executive director of the churchs Center for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the churchs leading think tank on the issue. Across thousands of miles, across decades, the abuse took eerily similar forms: People who grew up in orphanages said they were made to kneel or stand for hours, sometimes with their arms straight out, sometimes holding their boots or some other item. But the response of the defense was often to challenge the plaintiffs memories and even their very grasp of reality. And you guys here are representing people that you know nothing about. As Widman came to see, however, many of them were not actually orphans. She recalled exactly how she and the priest were seated in two armchairs face-to-face in the university classroom, her eyes cast to the floor. And, on the plane flying back to Rome, he made history again. Barquins assault had taken place decades ago, which would make it hard for White to find corroboration and easy for the church to question Barquins memory. They were forced to eat their own vomit. In the end, Widman told me, he blinked and they blinked. She was the most believable person Ive met in my life, he later told me. She recognized few of the 50 or 60 people in attendance. If the nuns and priests were so reluctant to talk about such an ordinary and innocent event as the passing of an elderly priest, what might they have withheld about dead children? Widman let out a big sigh. The man explained to me that he was told the boy had been playing and fell, but it was the middle of the night. Like Sallys wild tale about the boy who was electrocuted. She held up her fingers several inches apart, unmistakably suggesting the length of a penis. And women - actually, nuns who have been abused are contacting me now. But he was fully engaged when he asked Sally what allowed her to summon those recollections. One recalled that the girl had struggled and cried; another remembered that all the girls cried; one believed that she herself had spoken out, but that no one else said a word. A year after she arrived, one of the nuns discovered her body, stiff in the little straitjacket that she had been tied into. With that being said, Doris Wagner is with us now from Herzberg, Germany. The silence only enraged Sister James Mary, who kept hitting her. Does this hurt? A 1998 UK government inquiry, citing exceptional depravity at four homes run by the Christian Brothers order in Australia, heard that a boy was the object of a competition between the brothers to see who could rape him 100 times. How did money flow through the place? I heard similar tales from Catholic orphanages in other countries, too. Christine Kenneally is a senior investigations contributor based in Melbourne, Australia. The other 13 went to state court. She said, I remember what that nun did to me. So he and some of his colleagues brought together social services, police, and probation officers and created a new set of protocols for how abuse should be addressed. It was a chance most of them had never had before: to be heard, and maybe believed. Because I was going to finally straighten out shit that happened to me all my life and should not have never happened. But I found two death certificates for babies from St. Josephs that he himself had signed. If the children mentioned the incident, one witness remembered a nun saying, they would never see their parents again. You will cry! the nun insisted. Adams trussed the boy up and hung him from the ceiling. You don't - not to have any personal wishes or any personal ideas or versions of your life. In 1974, more than a century after they had arrived, the Sisters of Providence left North Avenue for good. Sally Dale had wanted to keep fighting. To date, the Vatican hasnt said what, if anything, it ever did with the information. Rob never knew why. When in the 40-odd-year period covered by the litigation had they occurred? I watched the poker get red. Five laymen who worked at the orphanage were also accused or convicted of child sexual abuse. Was he a victim of a brutal institutional environment? Some wanted therapists present at the meetings, but others were appalled by the suggestion. Sally climbed all the way to the top. But then, after years of accumulating public records, private journals, legal transcripts, and personal interviews, I gained access to a cache of documents that Robert Widman never saw. He would come up, regularly. They slapped and punched her and kicked her feet out from under her. Theyre old gals, he said. The priests during the middle ages were exempted from paying taxes due to their noble status in society. The expert witnesses would have to be summoned again and again, and the court would need to assemble different juries for each case.