MSC in the NT

MSC permanently altered life/history for one of the oldest civilizations on earth. How did that go?

The Missionaries

At, not the absolute pinnacle of THE Church’s Culture-power, that would be somewhere in the Dark Ages you'd imagine, but still punching at a very decent weight in the global-brain-washing stakes, the first Catholic Missionaries arrived in the NT.  Austrian Jesuits.  Famously intrepid dudes ... 

It's at this juncture, we encounter a plot-split in our story:

I want to keep an eye on the former whilst exploring a few characters from the later.  MSC tradition demands that its order-members serve 2-years - with at least 12 months at a grass-roots mission posting before moving onto the more relaxing works of Our Lord.  These missionary postings were, by definition in the furthest-flung corners of Christian Hegemony on planet earth.  

That's a nice contrast to the cushy cosplay-world of the higher-ups.  But it's in these communities where the nitty-gritty work of expanding global-mind-control took place -  so let’s explore that …

Golden Rule for research: put yourself in your subject's shoes - if you have any interest in understanding what happened, why they acted in the way they did.   In this story we have:

Firstly, to begin with the second one, if people from 50-60k years into some dystopian future  (or robots/aliens/hybrids/what-have-yous -  if peeps are extinct) were to suddenly appear & assume control, how would i handle it? 

Not great, i imagine.   Especially if they told me everything that was of value, my way of life, my skills, knowledge … that was now all meaningless … useless ... here’s some deadly drugs (alcohol) to help you spiral … & oh, btw, we used-up that culture-time to wreck the planet with pollution.  Sorry. 

It’s this cultural time-warp that sucked Australia’s original residents into its vortex.   Like a lot of world-altering events, it wasn't a big-bang in the beginning - it was a soft-bang  - not some explosive event - the opposite - quiet - not unobserved, but less-observed.

Soft-bang’s still become seismic in effect - just ask Covid - but it’s the slow-rising tidal wave that envelops you ... slowly, surely, then quickly,   You know it's happening, but peripherally, until it's too late, then you're swamped by it.

Such was the case with the appearance of MSC Aliens from the Everwhen in the Top End.

Stone-turning

(Under construction)

The Kiddies

Under construction

MSC Report Card

(under construction) 

Daly River

To get a clearer idea of what went down in the missions, we can refer to Father Tony Caruana, MSC, who did a one month relief stint at the Daly River mission in the early 80’s on his way back from a Papua New Guinea posting. This is around the time Fyfe was in charge of the Daly River mission - all the missions for that matter.  O'Loughlin, meanwhile, was a fixture as Bishop.

(note: Bishop as a piece in chess was also a Catholic culture-power-play - it used to be an Elephant in the original Indian game, but THE Church saw a re-branding opportunity in the mid 1200s, juiced-up the power while it was at it. Not as momentous as the earlier BC/AD coup, but typical of the cultural Catholicisization of human thinking.)

Father Caruana was interviewed for a thesis titled For the Love of God (PDF) on MSC’s NT mission work.  Caruana's observations, as an outsider, ring alarm bells …

For the Love of God (Beresford-Maning):

Tony Caruana .. was singularly unimpressed when he was welcomed to Daly River by a group of young girls who volunteered to ‘come home with you, Father, and look after you and give you anything you might want’.

When Father Caruana declared that he would look after himself the offer was repeated, and again rejected. The girls were clearly affronted and thereafter he was ignored by the greater part of the community for the duration of his stay.   Father Caruana’s refusal of their offer was based on his understanding that the girls were offering sexual favours rather than housework. (p210) (author conversation with Caruana)

Whilst reading this first time, thought maybe Caruana, was the one MSC with a conscience who was genuinely appalled by this off-the-rails sexualized culture happening at the missions … !

Let's see ...

Father Caruana

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Curious, i search Father Tony Caruana MSC ...  Page 1 results:

ABC: Paedophile priest Anthony William Peter Caruana has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexually abusing boys as young as 12 at a NSW school. (Chevalier College, MSC) Caruana was convicted of 26 offences against 12 students.

(He) committed his crimes when he was the school's dormitory master, rugby coach and bandmaster.  .. One of the victims was subjected to abuse of escalating severity after band practice (whereby) Caruana orally and anally raped the student and forced him to engage in sex acts while telling him: "You know God will like it if you please a man of God."

Judge Robyn Tupman: These boys were entrusted to the school and the care of teachers and priests like this offender and he abused that trust by sexually assaulting them.

Each of the offences was committed in circumstances where the offender had a special duty to each of these young boys. These boys were entrusted to the school and the care of teachers and priests like this offender.

ABC: Judge Tupman said all the victims suffered lasting psychological and emotional trauma.

She said Caruana even contacted the mother of one of his victims to tell her about her son's behavioural issues while he was abusing him.

Students who tried to tell their parents and the school about the abuse were not believed.

SMH: She also noted that “a complaint made about his behaviour while he was teaching at Daramalan College in the early 1970s which gave rise to a civil action against him”.

Judge Tupman said there was no further detail before the court on that action, and no indication any criminal proceedings arose as a result. But following the complaint, Caruana spent three years in Papua New Guinea before returning to teach at Australian schools.

Firstly, classic MSC/The Church. Judge Tupman is implying that he was sent to PNG as a result of the complaint at Daramalan, MSC in the early 70s. Without being able to verify that exactly, it fits neatly into MSC/The Church's standard operating procedure (as documented in the RC), that when a complaint about sexual misconduct is received, they immediately go into cover-up mode & start shunting offenders around their parishes.

But to put that aside for the time being, it at least gives us a timeline to work with re Caruana's report on the sexualized nature of children at the Daly River mission.

Sent to PNG for three years, after complaint(s) in the early 70s - that puts him in Daly River for his one month stint (when returning for a break from PNG) in the early to mid 70s. Let's say 1973-75.

(As Brother Burke, who arrived in the NT just before Cyclone Tracy hit on Christmas Eve 1974, noted, 1975 was a very interesting year. (p327)

So to recap this unholy MSC missionary position, what have we got so far?

Interestingly, in the case of Beresford-Manning's puff-piece on MSC missionary activity in the NT, she was granted access to the Kensington Archives in Sydney, but banned, by Father Tim Brennan (p419), from accessing the NT archives. Her guide was none other than Father Caruana, who she praised, noting that:

(A)rchivist, Father Tony Caruana MSC, was most helpful in locating material pertaining to Daly River in particular and the Northern Territory in general.

To be fair, she published in 2008, before Caruana's sex crime spree was known to the wider world outside MSC.


The Legacy Years

We brushed on the bifurcation within MSC between:

The Missionaries (Leary, Burke, Dodson et al) 

The Higher-ups, (Fyfe, O’Loughlin et al)

This extract throws some light on that dynamic …

For the Love of God: Brother Burke recalls that he had more than one confrontation with the then-Principal of St John’s, Brother Paul Brooks on the subject of boarders.  Once the Boarding House complex was completed Brother Brooks was keen to fill it.  Brother Burke, on the other hand, maintained that simply to bring in the greatest number of Aboriginal boarders, without hand picking them, could be more of a disadvantage than an advantage.

Brother Burke  .. knew that randomly to dump a concentration of Aboriginal boys from a mixture of different ‘countries’, different languages and different skin groups together would be to ask for trouble. P330

Yeah, that makes sense - if you have someone with understanding of the situation on the ground … listen to them.

Especially when the other option, the chosen path by the Sacred Heart of Jesus’s higher-ups was:

open-slather with a ban on cultural awareness.

Thinking being:  Aboriginal culture - it’s not real culture.  This is Big-picture assimilation stuff - we’re not here to tip-toe around.

Between the above options, i wonder if common-sense prevailed …  ?

For the Love of God:  And so, when he (Burke) was overruled, it turned out. Not only did the students often turn to fighting each other, but their presence in large numbers often deterred significant numbers of non-Indigenous Catholic students from choosing to go to St John’s.

Brother Burke recalls that at one stage, in order to minimise the vandalism and destruction being caused to the school buildings (as opposed to the boarding houses) a metal fence was erected around the boarding house with spear tipped railings.

The students saw these as being ideal weapons and ripped them off the fence to use them as such.

Ok.  We’ve talked about the MSC culture running off the rails - this is ripping the rails off to be used as ideal weapons.  

It’s hard to imagine more damning evidence of the deleterious effects of MSC’s crusading social-experiment.  Effects that resulted from a deliberate course of action -  despite frank warnings not to do it that way.

It was fairly common during this period that the boarding houses themselves were routinely vandalised – and the turnover in boarding house supervisors was unsurprisingly high.

Others who have worked with Indigenous students have reinforced Brother Burke’s view that they should be handpicked to optimise the value of the education they receive both for their own sakes as individuals and for the sake of their home communities. P331

I’d like to know how handy that hand-picking process was, but Brother Burke was right in that it was a disaster waiting to happen … not waiting, actually

Also: Not to forget the sakes of those who inevitably end up as collateral-damage-victims from these violent, out-of-control, laxly supervised social-experiment kids.  The ripple-out effect.  But ORGS do forget them. That's the primary program - protect The Image at all costs. Culpable mistakes are to be erased, forgotten ... ... then we all move on ...

Wendy Elizabeth Beresford-Manning, who wrote For the Love of God, forgot.   As you would.

Those outcasts caught in this sleight-of-hand twilight-zone belong in a different book: the Not for the Love of God’s.  Good luck waiting for a Professional Historian to write that one …