Even after Spotlight, even after Tuam, this book was a shock. Christine Kenneally's exposé of the abuse and torture of children in 20th-century orphanages fits neatly alongside those earlier stories of religious institutional child abuse. And yet, readers might find themselves emotionally unprepared.
Kenneally's book, "Ghosts of the Orphanage," focuses primarily on St. Joseph's Orphanage in Burlington, Vt., though it also touches on Native boarding schools as well as institutions in Canada, Ireland and Australia. Most were run by the Catholic Church. The appalling stories from all of those places are chillingly similar.
Children taken into these institutions were often stripped of their name, birthday and identity; they were known by numbers and sometimes by cruel nicknames. Punishments for even minor infractions ranged from strappings to beatings to isolation in dark closets, attics and, appallingly, a huge empty water tank where children were sometimes left for days.
Children who wet the bed were draped in the wet sheets. Children who vomited were made to eat the vomit. ("Lap it up," a nun commanded.) A girl who stole a piece of candy was beaten and then a nun burned her fingertips with matches. Children were thrown down stairs, dangled over stairwells and out of windows, tossed out of boats and told to swim. Some children died.
At night, children were summoned from their beds and subjected to all manner of physical and sexual abuse. A few escaped, only to find that no adults believed their stories. They were returned to the orphanage, where they were brutally punished.
The orphanage, Kenneally writes, was "a tiny totalitarian state, a dark castle, a factory of pain." Fifty, 60 years later, these now-grown children are still traumatized.
Kenneally is a diligent, patient reporter; her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere and her 2018 investigative piece on St. Joseph's in Buzzfeed prompted hundreds of leads that inform this book.
She gives generous credit to reporters who came before her — the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, who reported the story of sexually predating priests in 2002; Sam Hemingway, the reporter for the Burlington, Vt., Free Press, who also reported on St. Joseph's; Catherine Corless, the woman in Tuam, Ireland, whose dogged questions over years led to the discovery of hundreds of tiny bodies inside a sewer tank buried on the grounds of the old mother-and-baby home.
