I am writing to you today, Holy Father, on the eve of your arrival on Canadian soil, to inform you of the existence of another scandal involving your Church.
During the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of children placed in orphanages in Quebec were interned under false diagnoses in psychiatric hospitals (some orphanages were converted into psychiatric establishments). Both establishments were then run by Catholic religious communities. So that they can benefit from the subsidy granted to hospitals by the federal government, servile and unscrupulous doctors have labeled as mentally deficient these children aged barely seven years.
Now deprived of education and freedom, orphans become, overnight, “crazy”. They will be called the orphans of Duplessis, after the name of the prime minister at the time, who, in collusion with the medical and religious authorities, concocted this odious deception.
Having worked for several years in a psychiatric hospital, I have known some of these orphans who have become adults. (I accompanied one of them when he left the institution until his death several years later.) In the wave of deinstitutionalization that swept through Quebec in the 1970s, many orphans like him found themselves on the streets, without preparation or resources. Some joined the itinerant population of urban centers and ended their days in destitution and marginality.
Stigmatized and socially maladjusted, and mostly illiterate, many of them are reduced to living on their own, their meager social allowances not being enough to ensure them a decent existence. Some, undermined by illness and loneliness, experience an untimely death. The most desperate commit suicide. (A small number of them manage, despite everything, to ward off bad luck by starting a family and entering the labor market.)
Know, Holy Father, that the posthumous destiny of many Duplessis orphans is a reflection of their lives. They died sometimes very young, in often unexplained circumstances, their anonymous remains are sold, without autopsy, to medical schools or buried in mass graves. Even today, like hundreds of others before them, Duplessis orphans leave this land without leaving a trace, under the indifferent gaze of society.
As compensation for the long years they spent in a psychiatric setting, the Quebec government grants surviving victims financial assistance of a few thousand dollars (between $20,000 and $30,000). The height of the outrage, to be entitled to this – derisory – sum of money, they must renounce all legal action against the authors of their misfortunes. As for the abuse and other forms of violence they say they suffered during their internment (medical experiments, lobotomy, electroshock, forced labor, etc.), they are still waiting, from the responsible medical and religious authorities, for an apology and repairs.
In the days to come, Holy Father, you will have the historic opportunity to officially recognize the wrongs that your Church and its representatives have inflicted on these orphans. (Let us not forget, however, the nuns who, against all odds, devoted themselves body and soul to relieving their misery.)
Like the drama of Aboriginal children, that of the orphans of Duplessis challenges our moral, individual and collective conscience.
Holy Father, to refuse to assume the responsibility — however shared — of your Church in this human tragedy would, in my view, add injustice to ignominy.