A 90-year-old grandmother has told the Royal Commission about the night her 13-year-old son killed himself in 1974, probably after being sexually abused by one of the brothers at his Catholic high school.
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Audrey Nash spoke about how the Catholic church she had loved and served all her life had turned its back on her and how a senior figure in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese excused the behaviour of its paedophile members just three years ago by saying “it had been going on forever”.
Mrs Nash said the church figure, whose name was redacted by the commission, had said to her: “Look, Aud, it’s been going on forever. The Romans had their little boys, the Greeks had their little boys and the English aristocrats had their little boys.”
“I said: ‘And that makes it all right does it?’ I have not spoken to him since.”
The Nash family’s experience was at the centre of evidence given to the Newcastle hearing on Tuesday. Andrew’s older brother, code-named CQT, spoke bluntly and graphically about the overt physical violence and sexual abuse that he said had caused him and many others life-long problems.
“It feels like wave after wave of the kids dying from the 1970s until now,” CQT said. He said the nuns at Sacred Heart Primary School at Hamilton hit with rulers, canes and fists and were known as “the sisters without mercy”.
At Marist Brothers Hamilton he was abused by Brother Dominic, who would walk up behind a sitting boy, put his hand on his neck and then “work his way inside your pants”.
He repeatedly told his mother about the abuse but her reaction was to cry and tell him it was probably his own fault, and then lock herself in her room and pray.
Later, when his mother was telling things from her perspective, she confirmed his account of shutting herself away to pray, saying: “That was a big help.”
Mother and son told how they had found Andrew hanging from a hook on his bedroom door by his dressing-gown cord on the evening of October 8, 1974.
They said a parish priest arrived to administer Andrew’s last rites, followed by two other priests and three Marist Brothers, including Brother Romuald – the since-convicted paedophile Francis William Cable – who had asked whether Andrew left a note or said anything before he died.
Mrs Nash said she knew the Marist Brothers had a reputation for being “fierce disciplinarians” but it was not until 1995, when Vince Ryan – who she also knew well – had been arrested, did she start to think that “this is what happened with my Andrew”.
She said said she still had her religious beliefs but was appalled by the church.
