Chapter 32 — The Child of Satan

What happens when religious language transforms a harmed child into the supposed source of evil, danger or wrongdoing.

Not Something I Had Done

There is a difference between telling a child that he has done something wrong and telling him that something is wrong with him.

The first leaves open the possibility of correction.

The second can become an identity.

In my childhood, religious language moved increasingly towards the second.

I was not simply naughty.

I was not simply disobedient.

I was not simply a child who asked questions or resisted adults.

I became associated with something darker.

Satan.

Hell.

Evil.

The idea that there was something fundamentally wrong in me became part of the way adults explained what was happening.

The Child Becomes the Explanation

That reversal matters.

If a child is being hurt, one possible question is:

“Who is hurting this child?”

Another is:

“Why is this child behaving this way?”

If the second question is answered through religion, the adults around the child can begin to disappear from scrutiny.

The child becomes the explanation.

He is sinful.

He is sexually dangerous.

He is a liar.

He is possessed.

He belongs to Satan.

He is destined for Hell.

Once that story exists, almost anything done to the child can be reframed as a response to the child rather than an action by the adult.

From the Pulpit

One of my earliest memories of that public identity involves the church itself.

I was very young, perhaps around four.

My recollection is of being denounced publicly from the pulpit.

I was too young to understand the theology being applied to me.

But I understood something about being singled out.

I understood that adults were looking at me.

I understood that what was being said was not praise.

And I understood that the authority of the church was being used to tell other people something about who I was.

The precise wording of that occasion is not fully accessible to me now.

I do not want to manufacture a sermon which I cannot accurately remember.

What remains is the experience of public condemnation at an age when I could barely have understood the accusations being made.

What Public Condemnation Does

A statement made privately to a child is one thing.

A statement made publicly is another.

The child is no longer simply negotiating with one adult.

The audience becomes part of the experience.

Other adults have heard.

Other children may have heard.

The statement now exists socially.

A child who later complains about mistreatment may no longer be simply a child making a complaint.

He may already be the child whom adults have been told is wicked, untruthful or dangerous.

That is how reputation can become part of abuse.

A Story About Me

Over time a story developed around me.

I was a sinner.

I was sexually dangerous.

I was a compulsive liar.

I was associated with Satan.

I was destined for Hell.

Some of those descriptions were religious.

Some were sexual.

Some were moral.

Some later acquired the language of psychology or psychiatry.

But they shared something important.

They made the problem reside inside me.

That gave adults an enormous advantage.

The Useful Child to Disbelieve

If a child has already been described as a liar, then an accusation by that child becomes easier to dismiss.

If the child has already been described as sexually dangerous, then sexual abuse of the child can be turned around.

If the child is said to belong to Satan, resistance to religious authority can become further evidence of evil.

The labels reinforce one another.

The liar cannot be trusted.

The sinner deserves punishment.

The sexually dangerous child may be blamed for sexual conduct initiated by an adult.

The child associated with Satan can be subjected to religious intervention.

A closed system develops.

Vincent

Sister Vincent belongs within that system.

My memories of her are not limited to religious teaching.

I remember repeated sexual abuse involving her grabbing my hair and pulling my face into her crotch.

I also remember accusation.

The situation could be turned around so that I became the one treated as sexually improper.

That inversion had consequences beyond the immediate act.

It contributed to the wider story that there was something sexually wrong with me.

I was the child.

She was the adult.

She was also a nun.

Yet the religious authority of the adult made it possible for the child's behaviour to become the focus.

The Cast

At one point I had a heavy plaster cast on my arm following the broken elbow described earlier in this book.

Vincent again grabbed me.

By then I had been encouraged by people around me, including my mother and Herbie, to resist what was happening.

I struck her with the cast.

Then I ran home.

That act became another layer.

A child being sexually assaulted by an adult might reasonably be expected to defend himself.

But if the child has already been defined as violent, wicked or dangerous, the act of defence can be separated from what caused it.

The striking becomes the story.

The assault which preceded it disappears.

The Verandah

The events which followed eventually connected with my brother Robert.

I have already described the shooting elsewhere in this book and do not need to repeat the entire sequence here.

What matters in this chapter is the religious explanation which sat around it.

My recollection is that Robert said things which connected what happened with the religious judgement already surrounding me.

I remember the idea that I was somebody destined for Hell and that no punishment was too great.

Later Robert denied that the nuns had anything to do with the shooting.

That contradiction remains.

I preserve both layers.

I remember what I remember him saying at the time.

I also know what he said later.

I cannot make one disappear simply because the two do not fit neatly together.

No Punishment Too Great

The phrase “no punishment too great” represents one of the most dangerous possibilities inside a religiously closed system.

If eternal punishment is already believed to be justified, then ordinary human punishment can begin to look trivial.

If God himself is believed to intend infinite suffering for a person, what limit remains for the human beings who think they are acting on God's side?

That is not a theoretical question for me.

It changes the moral scale.

Pain can become deserved.

Violence can become correction.

Cruelty can become righteousness.

And the victim can become the person blamed for provoking it.

What Herbie Did Differently

Herbie offers an important contrast.

He was himself Catholic.

He was involved with the Knights of the Southern Cross.

He did not need to abandon religion in order to recognise that a child required protection.

That matters.

It prevents me from simplifying the history into a story in which every religious person behaved one way and every non-religious person behaved another.

Herbie listened.

He provided somewhere safe.

He confronted adults.

He tried to understand.

Whatever his beliefs about God, he did not appear to require me to become the source of the problem before he could make sense of what was happening.

Frank Scully

Other adults complicated the picture as well.

Frank Scully was also associated with the Catholic community and, in my memory, with the Knights.

Yet he did not sit comfortably within the same local relationships as Tom Dignam, Jim Desmond or Bill Allison.

I remember divisions.

Political differences.

Personal conflicts.

People who were Catholic without necessarily belonging to the same local faction.

That complexity matters because institutions are rarely one mind.

Even within a belief system capable of producing harmful ideas, individual people can resist, dissent or behave differently.

The Story Repeated Outside the Church

One of the disturbing things about childhood labels is that they can outlive the language which created them.

The religious words may disappear.

The underlying structure can remain.

The child who was once called wicked can later become the difficult adult.

The child called a liar can become the unreliable patient.

The child described as dangerous can become the person whose complaints are treated with suspicion.

The terminology changes.

The position in the story can remain remarkably similar.

That became important much later when psychiatric language entered my records.

I do not say that one automatically caused the other.

I do recognise the familiar structure:

something happens to me;

I report it;

the response becomes an examination of me.

What Happens to a Child Who Hears It Often Enough?

Children build some part of their identity from the responses of adults around them.

If enough adults say that a child is intelligent, the child may begin to believe that.

If enough adults say that a child is useless, that too can become part of the internal world.

What happens when the message is:

you are evil?

you are sexually dangerous?

you belong to Satan?

you are destined for Hell?

A child does not possess an adult philosophical framework with which to place those statements at a safe distance.

They arrive during the period when identity itself is being formed.

Believing and Not Believing at the Same Time

I do not think my childhood relationship with those claims was simple.

I could resist them.

I could be angry.

I could refuse church.

I could reject what adults were saying.

And still be frightened by it.

That is not necessarily contradictory.

A child can think:

“This is wrong,”

and simultaneously think:

“What if they are right?”

Fear does not require complete belief.

It requires enough uncertainty for the threatened consequence to remain possible.

Refusing the Church

Eventually I refused to continue participating in the way that had been expected of me.

I stopped going to church.

I refused the role of altar boy.

Those decisions were not an abstract declaration of atheism made after reading philosophy.

They emerged from experience.

The people who claimed authority through religion had become associated with danger.

I had learned that religious language could be used to explain why adults were right and I was wrong before anyone seriously investigated what had happened.

Withdrawal was one of the few forms of control available to me.

The Problem With Repentance

There is another strange consequence when the wrong person is assigned the role of sinner.

The system can begin demanding repentance from the person who was harmed.

The child may be expected to confess.

The child may be expected to apologise.

The child may be expected to become obedient.

Meanwhile the conduct of the adult can remain unexamined.

That reverses justice.

It places the burden of restoring order upon the person with the least power.

Who Needed Forgiveness?

As I grew older, the Christian emphasis upon forgiveness became difficult for me in another way.

Forgiveness can be a meaningful personal choice.

It can also be turned into another obligation imposed upon the injured person.

Before asking a harmed child or adult to forgive, I think there are more basic questions.

Has the harm been acknowledged?

Has it stopped?

Has responsibility been accepted?

Has the person who caused it been prevented from doing it again?

Has the injured person been allowed to tell the truth without punishment?

Without those things, a demand for forgiveness can become another way of restoring comfort to the institution rather than justice to the person who was harmed.

Not Born With the Label

I was not born believing I was a child of Satan.

I was not born believing I was sexually dangerous.

I was not born believing that I was destined for Hell.

Those ideas came from adults.

They were taught.

They were repeated.

They were reinforced by authority.

They became entangled with punishment and abuse.

That distinction became increasingly important to me later.

If an identity was imposed, it could also be examined.

It could be compared with evidence.

It could be rejected.

The Evidence of a Life

Eventually the adult life itself became evidence against the childhood description.

I worked.

I built businesses.

I drove coaches.

I cared for people.

I raised a son.

I became interested in geology, science, technology and systems.

I advocated for others.

I made mistakes.

I sometimes behaved badly.

I sometimes got things wrong.

In other words, I became an ordinary complicated human being.

Nothing in that life required Satan as an explanation.

Removing the Supernatural Explanation

Once I removed the supernatural explanation, the childhood events looked different.

A frightened child was frightened.

A sexually abused child was being sexually abused.

A child defending himself was defending himself.

A child who ran away was trying to get away.

A child who hid was trying to find safety.

A child who could not explain everything did not necessarily lack truth.

The behaviour no longer required demons.

It required context.

What If the Adults Were Wrong?

That is perhaps the question which should have been asked much earlier.

What if the adults were wrong?

Not merely mistaken about one incident.

Wrong about the entire framework through which they were interpreting the child.

What if there was no Satan inside the child?

What if there was no supernatural evil to remove?

What if there was simply a frightened child surrounded by adults whose beliefs allowed them to misunderstand fear as wickedness?

The consequences of that error would not have been theological.

They would have been physical.

Psychological.

Social.

And enduring.

From Label to Procedure

Once a child has been defined as carrying something evil, another step becomes possible.

Adults may decide that something must be done to remove it.

That is where the language of Satan and Hell moves beyond accusation.

It becomes procedure.

Prayer.

Testing.

Restraint.

Interrogation.

Exorcism.

What adults called those procedures is the next part of the story.