Mark Wakely, a former Newcastle Herald and ABC journalist, was a young pupil of Brother Romuald - Francis William Cable - who died aged 90 this week while serving his long sentence for multiple child sexual abuse. Here Mark reflects - not as a victim but as a witness - on his teacher, in whose classroom cruelty and pedophile behavior seemed simply part of school life.
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BROTHER Romuald - Francis William Cable - was my form master in my second year at Marist Brothers, Hamilton. He taught me science and religion, and did his level best to teach me hate, during my secondary education in the 1970s. In the half century since, I have never personally encountered a more evil human being.
Although he was jailed for the sexual abuse of some 20 boys, I have no doubt whatsoever that the number of victims who have struggled to come forward is significantly higher. Romuald's preferred tools of torture were sadism and shame; he inflicted both these with rat-cunning upon his young victims in order to satisfy his sexual urges. He operated within a protected culture, one in which blatantly touching a pupil's genitals in schoolyards or sports fields - the devil's playground - was seen as nothing more than a bit of "kiddy fiddling"; The word "abuse" had not yet been written.
A dangerous master manipulator, Romuald's random violent corporal punishment was the least of all the suffering he inflicted, paling into insignificance next to his convictions of anal rape of his pupils. Emotional blackmail and institutional cover-ups prevented his exposure for decades.
Some boys, like myself, who escaped the worst of Romuald's predatory behaviour - and perhaps whose judgement of his actions seemed a threat - he then set about destroying psychologically through callous public humiliation in horrendous, sometimes bizarre, ways: One day after I had rejected an approach - more out of fear, or confusion about my own body, than bravery - he told my fellow pupils in a classroom, totally apropos of nothing, that Mark Wakely would be dead of a drug overdose before I turned 30. I was 13 years old.
Other instances of his strangely vindictive and vicious behaviour remain too painful to mention. But I was far from alone and history shows I got off relatively lightly compared with the lives he destroyed through sexual abuse. Although as a journalist myself, I know that the easily-understood, shocking harm of child sex abuse has always been highlighted far more by we in the media than the difficult-to-explain complexities of emotional abuse.
It seems no accident that I parted ways with the teachings of Catholicism when Brother Romuald entered my life to teach religion, in his own debauched and manipulative way. For instance, he took boys, one by one from classrooms, for private spiritual guidance interviews in the bike shed, where he asked us about our penises and nocturnal emissions, all in the name of sex education and too often as a preamble to grooming boys for much worse to come.
Children he was meant to protect he tortured, sentencing them to carry a lifelong shame that was never theirs to carry, treating them with the distain of dirt on the polished black shoes he wore beneath his immaculate white robe of Catholicism. Yet almost mysteriously in retrospect, there were some boys he never touched and strangely even protected from his own cruel heart.
I have lived my life surrounded by loving people. I have tried not to let hate enter my life. But I truly hate that this man in death has now achieved the peace that has been denied to so many of his victims and their families.
Five years after I left school I fell deeply in love and spent the next 38 years with Steven James Alward, having met as cadet journalists, right here at the Newcastle Herald. Steven had attended St Pius X high school, Adamstown. The abuse and complex shame inflicted by Steven's teacher, convicted pedophile Father John Denham, contributed directly to Steven's death by suicide four years ago, as explained so powerfully in The Altar Boys by ABC investigative journalist Suzanne Smith. Smith's explosive book exposed an epidemic of suicides among older men resulting from the long shadow cast by widespread child abuse by clergy within the Newcastle-Maitland Catholic Diocese. A register kept by the Clergy Abused Network puts the diocese's staggering tally of abuse-related suicides in the scores.
Not one Marist Brother now teaches at my old Catholic school in Hamilton. An astonishing number, including my then principal, have been imprisoned. And now, my old teacher and tormentor, Brother Romuald, is dead.
How will the Heaven that this man said he believed in receive his soul? And on earth, how should we mark his grave? One of Romuald's youngest victims to suicide, was Andrew Nash, who hanged himself aged 13 from his bedroom door. Take that door off its hinges; let it stand alone as my evil teacher's headstone.
LIFELINE: 13 11 14
Romuald's preferred tools of torture were sadism and shame
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