SPRING 1998

A former Republican paramilitary has admitted openly in the Sunday Times of 29^th March 1998, that the Roman Catholic terrorists of the I.R.A. (whose political allies, Sinn Fein, now sit in the "Peace Process" discussing our future), waged a war of "Ethnic Cleansing" against Protestants in the border areas of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh. Vincent McKenna, who has now become a peace campaigner, claims that the East Tyrone Brigade of the I.R.A., led by Jim Lynagh who was killed by the S.A.S. at Loughgall in 1988, planned to drive the Protestant population out of Tyrone bit by bit. The strategy was based on Mao's guerilla warfare strategy. The aim was to create "liberated areas" or zones where no Protestants would be left to defend the land. To that end, prominent farmers, businessmen, heads of households and only sons were targeted. McKenna said of the policy - "that way we would get the territory, a field at a time. The bottom line was sectarian."

By ROSEMARY WEST, Religious Affairs Reporter Two former Catholic school students have alleged nuns sexually abused them in a Melbourne college and a South Australian convent. The former students made the allegations to a telephone help-line run by Broken Rites, a mutual support and advocacy group for victims of abuse. A former student at Genazzano College in Kew told the help-line that she was sexually abused by a nun at the school in 1966. Ms Chris Wilding, the convener of Broken Rites, said it was the second report she had received of sexual abuse in Catholic convents. The second woman alleged she was sexually abused at the age of 14 by two older girls in the presence of a nun in Les Pines Home of Compassion, more than 30 years ago. The Home was a Catholic girls Home run by the Good Shepherd Sisters in South Australia. Ms Wilding said there was evidence the alleged perpetrators in the two cases may have abused others. Ms Wilding said the former student told her she had been abused almost every day by a teaching nun in the classroom after school. The nun, who is now dead, would digitally rape her and then beat her with the blackboard ruler. Then the nun would ring the girl's parents and tell them she had been kept in for bad behaviour and she would be punished again when she got home. At the end of the year, the girl told her father of the abuse and pleaded to be allowed to go to the High School. But he did not believe her and said it would break her mother's heart if she left Genazzano.

Two years later the girl's father told her another girl had made a similar report and that he now believed her. The nun had been moved to another school where she was made principal and had contracted stomach cancer. Sister Maryrose Dennehy, the provincial of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, which runs Genazzano and a former principal and deputy principal of the school said she was "shocked and surprised" to hear of allegations against nuns. She had taught with the nun in question at the time and had heard of no allegations of sexual abuse against her. She appealed to the woman making the allegation to come forward and said she would listen to her and do her best to offer whatever help she could. She did not know whether she could investigate the allegation as both the nun in question and the principal at the time have died. She said she had never heard any allegations of sexual abuse by nuns, though she had heard of five or six allegations of Sisters striking children over the 20 years of her involvement with the school. "Even then (in the 1960's) that was not considered acceptable," she said. Ms Wilding said the help-line had received many other reports from women of cruelty and non-sexual abuse in Catholic schools in the 1950's and 1960's.

RAPE AT AN ALL-GIRLS HOME

At 13, Veronica ran away from home to escape ill-treatment by a strict RC mother. She was sent to Les Pines girls home which, she says, was virtually a reformatory, where hardened offenders mixed with teenage victims of child abuse and neglect. The girls were used as "slave labour" in a laundry run by the nuns, Veronica says. A particularly "masculine" nun was in charge of the laundry, she recalls, with two much older girls. These girls had been prostitutes who had bashed and robbed their clients and scared the younger girls. The girls slept in dormitories in curtained-off cubicles. One night, the two girls came to her bed and raped her with a candle. One held a pillow over her head and pinned her arms down while the other raped her. They told her if she stopped yelling they would take the pillow off her head. As they left, she noticed the nun standing at the foot of her bed with a torch. The nun handed her a flannelette menstrual pad to staunch her bleeding and warned her not to talk about it. "You know what happens to people who tell lies," she told her. More than 35 years have passed and Veronica had never spoken to anyone about it, not even her husband, until she rang Broken Rites. She was concerned all the media coverage was about abuse by men, whereas her experience was of abuse by women. The experience left her unable to relate to women and afraid of sex.

MONTREAL - The bishops who reigned supreme in Quebec for more than a century would wince. These days church pews are rarely filled, and more couples in Quebec live together unmarried than anywhere else in Canada. The Roman Catholic Church, once the rock on which French Canadians built their identity, now plays a radically diminished role in Quebec society. Though nearly all of the province's six million French-speakers have Catholic roots, less than ten per cent attend Mass regularly, compared with ninety per cent a few decades ago. Once-pervasive Church influence over politics and culture has faded almost totally.