MONTREAL — Herve Bertrand remembers the day when his life at a Quebec orphanage turned inside out.
"On March 18, 1954, the nuns came in and said, 'From today, you are all crazy.' Everyone started to cry, even the nuns. Then everything changed: Our lessons stopped, and work--they called it therapy--began. I saw the bars go on the windows, the fences go up around the compound. I saw the autobuses pull up full of psychiatric patients--our new roommates. It was like a prison. And that's where I spent a quarter of my life."
Bertrand, 57, was among more than 3,000 children living in 12 Quebec orphanages that the Roman Catholic Church transformed--some virtually overnight--into mental hospitals in the 1940s and '50s to reap more generous government subsidies. A policy ordained by Quebec's then-premier, Maurice Duplessis, granted the institutions more than three times the amount of money to care for a mental patient as they received for orphans. So, in order that the children would qualify, their medical records were altered to declare them mentally unstable or retarded.
But that was not just a change of labels, say the now-middle-aged orphans: The church sold their souls. Many were treated like mental patients, with unnecessary drugs and straightjackets.
It took the orphans nearly 40 years to organize and ask the church and state for redress. They finally got an answer last year. Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard apologized for his predecessor's mistakes and offered nominal compensation. But he also praised the "great deal of devotion" of the nuns who cared for the children.
Church officials were less contrite. "They don't deserve an apology," said Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, adding that real responsibility lay not with the religious community, but with the parents for their wayward lifestyles.
While the government and the church resist confronting the past, members of this damaged generation are still trying to find closure and compensation for the childhood they will never recover.
Montreal is a city of churches, a riverside capital where the skyline is crowded with steeples, a place, it is said, where you can't throw a rock without breaking a stained-glass window. Until the last few decades, the Catholic Church held sway here just as surely as the government did. It ran not only orphanages but schools and hospitals, and it handled most social services.
