CONNECT/Eddie Holt: The recent recollections of former Christian Brother Tom Dunne illustrate how deeply the order was influenced - in its inherited 'muscular Christianity' and its contempt for 'the natives' - by the empire and the class it was intended to oppose
'The 'discipline', a set of knotted leather thongs, was handed to each at the start of Lent and we were expected to flagellate our bare backs, morning and evening," writes former Christian Brother Tom Dunne in the current edition of the quarterly Dublin Review. "I imagined that most, like myself, choose to beat the pillows instead, safe in the privacy of our cubicles (the celibacy culture had advantages) and was shocked to note the weals on a friend's back when we recommenced swimming in the sea in March."
The physical and sexual abuse of children by clerics has left shocking psychological weals on victims, in particular, and Irish society in general.
We have heard the sorrowful, angry and despairing voices of victims, the outraged voices of commentators, the dissembling voices of politicians, lawyers and PR merchants. Seldom, however, have we heard a voice with inside experience of the "Christian" culture that generated such a toxic combination of professed piety and self-righteous sadism.
Tom Dunne was 14 in 1957 when he left home to prepare to become a Brother. His ancestor, John Rice, executed in 1798, was a cousin of Edmund Ignatius Rice, the founder of the Christian Brothers. Dunne, from a "relatively well-off background" - the son of New Ross shopkeepers - was motivated to become a "postulant", he says, by a combination of reasons. Certainly, there was religious commitment - personal and boosted by family history - but "romantic and adventurous" impulses to become a foreign missionary impelled him too.
Aside from flagellation, that recommencement of "swimming in the sea in March" shows that, ironically, although "it was an intensely Gaelic environment", a version of the British and Victorian ethos of "muscular Christianity" prevailed in the Brothers at least into the 1960s. There was, of course, as there was for all those muscular Christian Brits, an empire of sorts to be serviced. Africa, Australia, India and America - North and South - gave the intensely Gaelic and nationalist Christian Brothers an international, indeed an imperial dimension.
That empire, in which, in its mother country, Dunne asserts, the Irish language and Gaelic games were "almost as central a part of the culture of the Brothers as Catholicism itself", obviously had muscular connections to the playing fields of the Brothers' schools. For a postulant like Dunne, boarding-school was "very much as I had imagined" it "from the stories of Greyfriars, with its emphasis on games, codes of honour and study". Clearly, Billy Bunter meets Iggy Rice produced a formidable form of "formation" for teenagers.
Tellingly, it was repeatedly emphasised to postulants that they had left their original families to join a new one. In time, they would take new names to stress the shedding of old identities. Tom Dunne became "Brother Bosco" (surely an ominous sign that the new family's dysfunction was kicking in!). Dunne chose it, he says, because Bosco, the founder of the rival Salesians, "had forbidden the use of corporal punishment and relied instead on persuasion". Later, however, "my attempts to emulate him got me into some difficulty with superiors". No doubt they did, Tom. No doubt at all.
At Colaiste Ciarán, the Greyfriars-ish boarding-school, "there was no corporal punishment and bullying was not allowed". The best teaching Brothers taught there. Evidently, postulants to the new family were in a different category than boys who chose to remain with their original ones.
There was, nonetheless, Dunne insists, as he "imagines is the case in the army, remarkable camaraderie and an intensity of purpose". Certainly, armies can generate consuming camaraderie and profound purpose but so too can cults.
"It was all profoundly civilised, carefully disciplined and impressively caring," writes Dunne. Fair enough - the new family looked after its own. How then, did so much of it go so hideously wrong? The following is significant: "While their 'houses of formation' were staffed with their brightest and best, the Brothers, it seems, often left the far more needy boys of their industrial schools to the inadequate or the troubled, who were given no special training and little supervision.
"While the individuals concerned have to bear their own weight of responsibility for wrongs committed, there are clearly also ways in which the whole order was to blame. Founded to look after marginalised and vulnerable children, it had come to define itself by its successful, increasingly middle-class schools and by a mixture of muscular Christianity and militant nationalism that fitted its culture of physical violence all too well. The corrosive, dehumanising effects of that cultural mix can hardly be exaggerated."
Perhaps not. No doubt, some of the perverts who abused, beat and buggered young boys would have done so without joining the new family of a religious order. But there's got to be a category of abusers activated by the "formation" aspects of the entire project. After the civility, discipline and caring of the early years, Dunne's introduction to teaching, one month short of his 18th birthday, to teach a sixth class in a Dublin school, was typical. Handing him a leather, the principal said: "Begin as you mean to go on. It's either you or them and they understand nothing else."
Echoing another principal's advice to John McGahern on his first day as a lay primary school teacher in Drogheda in 1955 ("Bate it into them!"), the muscularity of the Christianity was clearly on steroids as soon as a classroom beckoned. By the last of his seven years as a Christian Brother, Dunne's refusal to impose discipline "in the traditional way" led to a principal berating him "in front of a bemused class" and all but accusing him "of being homosexual".
There's pressure to conform. Care had been taken in the schooling of Tom Dunne, but as Brother Bosco - a commissioned officer, if you wish - he was expected to show the institution's required ruthlessness. "The cliché regularly invoked was of being 'cruel to be kind'; it was a hard world and corporal punishment 'made a man of you' as well as encouraging the necessary effort."
Being on the receiving end of corporal punishment was then widely held to make men of boys, but it's clear that administering it regularly made beasts of men. In a Tralee industrial school, where Dunne "spent several weeks of relief duty in the summer of 1963", the atmosphere of "meanness, bleakness and fear" generated a "profoundly upsetting experience". He suppressed all memories of that "secret, enclosed world, run on fear", where "the boys were wholly at the mercy of the staff, who seemed to have entirely negative views of them". It's that last bit - the staff's holding entirely negative views of the boys - which must derive in large part from the formative muscular Christianity, which, after all, promoted flagellation.
Looking back, the imperial project behind the "character-building" barbarism of British public schools, where bullying and buggering enabled the sanctioning of butchery in the colonies, was replicated in the worst of the Christian Brothers schools. Three years after Dunne left the order, he was studying for the Higher Diploma in Education. He wrote seeking a reference and teaching hours, but got no replies. "I had ceased to exist," he concludes his account. So he had - Brother Bosco had not been muscular enough. He was a wimp.
We ought not be surprised. As a colony of Britain, Ireland was regularly shafted. As a colony of the Vatican, some of the "natives" were unworthy and there was an ample supply of brutes to do the dirty work. It does not exonerate the Ireland which tolerated and, at times, was complicit in the cultish brutality. But it does acknowledge that there were powerful forces of formation acting on it too. For providing a voice from inside a now reviled institution - where, alongside the monsters, there were many fine and decent people - Tom Dunne's story is a smear of rare verbal balm for the shocking psychological weals that disfigure this country.