The God Squad

OPINION: Sexual violence is at the heart of Christian Brother thinking and practice. Sadly, the Ryan report fails to draw obvious conclusions, writes JIM BERESFORD

REFERRING TO the beating and humiliation of child prisoners described in the Ryan report, theologian Mary Condren (Opinion and Analysis, June 13th) says it was well known that “many religious congregations used the discipline, small whips, every week on their own naked flesh . . . Others actively practised public humiliation.” I thank Condren for breaking a taboo.

Indeed the Christian Brothers used self-flagellation to punish the sexual impulse, hoping thereby to preserve the vow of chastity. Novices as young as 15 at their Marino novitiate were issued with the “discipline” and instructed to use it whenever they fell into sexual sin by thought or deed. As one novice informed me: “we were told to whip our bottom while saying Hail Marys”.

Self-flagellation is not an aberration of Christianity; it is a form of mortification at least as old as western monasticism and is still practised by many Christians today. Many of the famous saints were self-flagellants and proud of it. A whipping is thought to purify the body of sexual sin – though in truth it often has the opposite effect. Although modern psychology regards the practice as an expression of psycho-sexual pathology, self-flagellation was an essential part of the religious formation of Christian Brother novices until the 1960s.

By the time he arrived at Artane reformatory aged 18-20, a Christian Brother would have spent most of his teenage years whipping his own bottom as punishment for what he believed to be his sexual sinfulness and he was likely by then to have developed a sadomasochistic sexuality. Before being dispatched to Artane a novice was briefed that reformatory boys were sexually depraved and therefore in need of strong sex discipline. The briefing notes for novices said: “These boys need firmer discipline than normal boys . . . your first three priorities should be discipline, discipline and discipline”.

Once in the prison, the novice was instructed by the resident monks how to punish a sex offence. This usually entailed administering up to 20 strokes of the cane or strap on the bare backside of the “offender”, especially one known or alleged to have been sexually penetrated by a monk or another inmate (The brotherhood chose to believe the rape of a boy was a mere misdemeanour and the boy himself the real transgressor). This was a form of punishment approved for use on recusant reformatory boys by the education minister – though the same minister strictly prohibited such punishment in Ireland’s national schools.