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NO MERCY FOR DUPLESSIS ORPHANS VATICAN IGNORES CANADIAN HOLOCAUST
Uncategorized August 24, 2016, 0 Comment 587NO MERCY FOR DUPLESSIS ORPHANS
VATICAN IGNORES CANADIAN HOLOCAUST
By
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.
(author of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia)
The Vatican, under Pope Francis, continues to ignore pleas for reparation from the surviving Duplessis orphans.
Despite the fact that the Quebec government has settled a claim action suit from the survivors, the Holy See has never expressed sorrow or regret over its part in a tale that involves mass murder, physical abuse, forced labor, and the wholesale dumping of hundreds of bodies near a pig sty.
Even worse, the tale has not gained the attention of the international press.
In post World War II Montreal, thousands of children, who had been placed in Catholic orphanages, were suddenly proclaimed as mentally retarded and handed over to Catholic asylums for the insane. The motive for the reclassification was money. Subsidies for orphans, under the government of Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis, were $1.25 per day for orphans and $2.75 per day for mental patients. Moreover, the Church could receive substantial financial assistance for building new psychiatric hospitals. Mr. Duplessis was much praised by the press for his commitment to the mental health of the people of Quebec.[i]
FORCED LABOR, SEXUAL ABUSE AND PHYSICAL TORTURE
Over 20,000 children, most from unwed mothers, ended up in the Catholic asylums.[ii] The asylums were run by such religious orders as the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of Mercy, the Gray Nuns of Montreal, the Sisters of Charity of Quebec, the Little Franciscans of Mary, the Brothers of Notre Dame-de-la-Misericorde, and the Brothers of Charity.[iii].Children were subjected to forced labor and physical torture. “They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something wrong,” Clarina Duguay, a surviving Duplessis orphan, said. Duguay also testified of being chained to a bed and forced to scrub the floors of the asylum from morning to night.[iv]
Martin Lecuyer, another survivor, said that the children received no schooling but rather were sent to work on nearby farms. “The farmers would pay the religious community for the work we did,” he said. “This was slavery, that’s the word for it.”[v] At night, Lecuyer claimed that he was regularly sexually assaulted by a religious brother from the time he was 11. When he complained to a superior about the abuse, he was beaten with a leather strap.[vi]
CHEMICAL EXPERIMENTATION
But the sexual abuse, forced labor, and torture paled in comparison with the drug experimentation. The children served as guinea pigs for Chlorpromazine, a drug known as a “chemical bully club” because of its mental and physical consequences. A chief side effect of the drug is tardive dyskinesia, a central nervous system disorder that results in grotesque facial conditions and involuntary body movements. The use of Chlorpromazine on the orphans was part of the MK-Ultra mind-control program of the CIA.[vii] Dr. Ewen Cameron, the psychiatrist who conducted appalling tests on human subjects at McGill University, spearheaded much on the experimentation.[viii]
In addition to Chlorpromazine, the children were also subjected to electric shock, lobotomies, and doses of additional drugs, many hallucinogenic. Clarina Duguay said that she began receiving Chlorpromazine two weeks after she arrived at St. Julien Hospital. The nuns had told her the drug would help her sleep. It did more than that. “It made me a zombie,” she maintained. “I had no energy. I was always feeling sleepy, had a hard time getting up. I was getting the drug every night.”[ix]
Paul St. Aubain, another Duplessis orphan, said he was lobotomized at St. Michel Archange, a Catholic asylum in Joliette, when he was 18. “I wasn’t ill,” Mr. St. Aubain said. “They did it without my consent, without my permission. They were experimenting on me. I was their prisoner.” He said he was also subjected to electroshock therapy and daily doses of psychiatric drugs.[x]
PIG STY
Many of the children, like Mr. St. Aubain, suffered permanent brain damage. Some died. Their bodies were buried on an 800 acre plot of ground on the outskirts of Montreal that was next to a pig sty. The land was owned by the Archdiocese of Montreal, which was governed by Cardinal Paul-Emile Leger, a leader of the progressive party at Vatican II. Albert Sylvio, a Duplessis orphan who had been placed at St. Jean de Dieu, recalls transporting more than 60 bodies of fellow orphans to mass grave site during the 1950s. “We put them in cardboard boxes,” he said. “There was never any ceremony. Some had died on the operating table. Some had been sick and some committed suicide.”[xi]
Death had its reward for the religious sisters and brothers in charge of the orphans. The bodies of many of the children were sold to local medical schools for dissection. A Quebec law passed in 1942 allowed the members of religious orders to sell unclaimed remains for $10.[xii]
LOVING KINDNESS
The story of the orphans came to light during the waning days of Paul VI’s pontificate. The cries for redress were ignored by the pope and his two immediate successors. Eventually, the surviving orphans organized to pressure the Church and the Canadian government for justice. After nearly fifteen years of litigation, the Quebec government in 2001 granted the survivors the meager sum of $10,000 per person plus an additional $1,000 for each year of wrongful confinement to a mental institution.[xiii] But the Church refused to apologize or to provide a dime.
Alain Arsenault, a Montreal-based attorney who represents the orphans, said: “The Catholic Church of Quebec is the main perpetrator in this case, while the government assisted it. The Church has never apologized for anything,” What’s more, according to Arsenault, the Vatican and the Archdiocese continue to insist that Holy Mother Church showed loving kindness to the orphans by providing them with food and shelter.[xiv]
Regarding the torture, the forced labor, the sexual abuse, and the horrific experimentation, Archbishop Christian Lepine of Montreal recently said: “If it’s someone in an institution, even if it’s someone who’s there in the name of his own religion —being a Christian— if he does something unjust, well, it’s still as a member of the church. It’s not the church itself.”[xv]
[i] Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Orphans of the 1950’s, Telling of Abuse, Sue Quebec,” New York Times, May 21, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/21/world/orphans-of-the-1950-s-telling-of-abuse-sue-quebec.html?pagewanted=all
[ii] News Staff, “Duplessis Orphans Want Montreal Burial Site Dug Up,” CTV News – Montreal, Canada, June 18, 2004, 2004,https://web.archive.org/web/20111022154328/http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20040619/duplessis_orphans_040618/
[iii] Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Orphans of the 1950’s.
[iv] Christine Hahn, “The Worst of Times: How Psychiatry Used Quebec’s Orphans as Guinea Pigs,” Freedom, May 22, 2003, http://www.freedommag.org/english/canada/reports/page01.htm
[v] Peter Rakobowchuk, “Duplessis Orphan Can’t Forget Sexual Abuse Almost 60 Years Ago,” Brooks Bulletin, December 21, 2006, http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2006/11_12/2006_12_21_Rakobowchuk_DuplessisOrphan.htm
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Christine Hahn, “The Worst of Times.”
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] William Marsden, “Duplessis Orphans Call for Exhumations,” National Post, June 19, 2004, http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/duplessis_orphans.html
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] “Duplessis Orphans Accept Quebec’s Final Offer,” CBC News, July 1, 2001.
[xiv] “Canada’s Dark Secret: Forgotten Case of the Duplessis Orphans,” Sputnik News, December 15, 2015, http://sputniknews.com/world/20151215/1031794624/duplessis-orphans-canada-quebec-catholic-church.html
[xv] “Duplessis Orphans Continue to Demand for Church Apology,” Huffington Post, March 20, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/30/duplessis-orphans-continu_n_2984767.html
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