Georges* still hasn’t told his own child.
More than 60 years after being repeatedly attacked by a member of the congregation of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, he alleges, the 74-year-old man feels incapable of doing so.
Anyone who has had a successful career in the provincial civil service has always been “workaholic”. He would like to explain to her why he was never at home when he was little.
“My child suffered so much from my absences,” he laments.
Work was his drug to freeze his suffering.
Pain caused by the sexual assaults he suffered from the age of 12 to 14**.
It took everything for him to tell his own wife. In fact, his confidences came too late. The couple was in mediation with a view to their separation after 30 years of living together.
And then, only then, did he explain to her why he was running away from home; always “out there” for work.
Why was it so hard for him to be touched. To let yourself be loved.
Why he woke up “panicking” so often in his sleep. All these years of living “like strangers, living in the same house, without touching each other, separate rooms”. “She was rightly disgusted with me and left me,” he said.
Georges doesn’t blame him. He would have done the same thing in his place.
It was a painful secret to keep my whole life. I’m still shaking.
Georges, in a long interview given to The Press
Georges is one of the members of the request for authorization to bring a collective action against the Brothers of Christian Instruction (FIC); request which returns to court this month.
The action targets people, as well as their heirs, who were sexually assaulted in Quebec by any employee, member or employee of this religious congregation between 1er January 1940 and the judgment to take place. The amount sought is $10 million in punitive damages.
Georges was granted anonymity in connection with the action. The media therefore cannot name him.
The FIC contests the request for authorization of the collective action. Contacted by The Press,Me Luc Lachance, from the firm that represents the congregation – LDB lawyers – told us by email that the latter had “a policy of not commenting on current legal cases”.
A job offer as a decoy
Georges comes from a family where one becomes a lawyer from father to son; a family where we get involved in politics. But when it came time to go into law, he was too emotionally screwed, he says. He “failed” his registration, like a failed act.
If he testifies today, it is to encourage other victims of aggressor brothers and priests to denounce.
At 12, Georges was orphaned by his father, the latter having died two years earlier after a long illness. His mother, very religious, took care of a large family alone.
Brother Samuel-Marie – real name Alcide Tessier – had offered him a paid job in a small printing shop in the FIC community present in his region.
This job offer is not a detail for a teenager who then lives in a family plunged into precariousness due to the illness followed by the death of the patriarch. Brother Samuel-Marie, who died in 2004, was a teacher and provincial treasurer of the congregation.
It was at the printing press that the attacks took place, Georges alleges. During the school term, they would have occurred every weekend, days when he worked. In summer, “almost every day, sometimes twice a day”.
At the time of the attacks, the teenager did not tell anyone. “It’s not something we brag about or talk about,” he said.
Then, at 14, he discovered that he was not his brother’s only “great love”. The latter provided “medical care”, this is what he would have said to young Georges, to other young boys.
I had just realized that I had been betrayed, that I had been the subject of a deception, that everything was a lie, only to finally realize that I had been abused, raped.
George
At the time, Georges developed “terrible anger” while finding himself “so stupid”. He becomes a shadow of himself. “I had doubts about my intellectual and emotional abilities, extreme humiliation, I was dirty, a person who no longer had his place in society,” he says. It closed me off from life, from love and deprived me of a normal life. »
Marked for life
Georges will spend the rest of his life “punishing himself”. First at the seminar, by multiplying the difficult tasks that no one wanted to do like waxing all the floors. He slept little or not at all. Then during his higher education, where he studied during the day, in addition to campaigning in a political party while holding a night job.
He can’t sleep anyway. “I was choking at night, having panic attacks and waking up suddenly, so no more sleeping. I avoided going to bed,” he says. He develops all kinds of illnesses (asthma, headaches) from which he cannot cure.
Georges will pursue his entire career to the fullest, even if it ends up costing him his family.
It was only when he retired, just a few years ago, that he began to truly take care of himself: long meditations, gardening and long walks.
Every day I try to get rid of this anger.
George
Georges learned of the existence of the collective action led by the Arsenault Dufresne Wee Avocats firm in the media a little less than two years ago. He signed up, driven by the deep desire “that these people who are said to be religious, excellent educators and of great integrity would end up, in one way or another, becoming aware that there was something unhealthy in their Christian teaching… and begin to change their behavior.”
Sixty-three people have registered as victims in this class action request so far.
Questions haunt Georges – and will always haunt him: “What would my life have been like without this painful experience that I have never forgotten? Without punishment or anger, without this ostracized mark on my forehead, without this secret that I could not reveal to anyone, without this cursed smell of semen that I hated so much all my life and that I constantly smelled on me, without this accursed stain which overwhelmed me? »
*His name is fictitious; his story is not.
**The allegations have not yet been proven in court, hence our use of the conditional.