The Contemptuary. David Foster

the nineteen-sixties and -seventies that foundlings as young as six years were routinely anally raped and ‘tortured’ (which just means flogged, put in cages, made to eat their own vomit, stand in the dining room with soiled sheets on their heads if they’d wet the bed, that kind of thing, forget the ‘torture’, bad boys need correction) by various Salvation Army male personnel, according to evidence recently presented to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. At A-wing in protection where rockies while away their days, they mix with each other but not with other inmates, the modern warder’s job being largely to protect inmates from other inmates. Rockies — rock spiders, pedos — have urine and faeces hurled at them, are jibed and spat at by other inmates and classified by other inmates as ‘putrid’ ‘very putrid’ and ‘very very putrid’. A man who has raped a six-year old boy would be classified ‘very putrid’.

      And so platinum-blond Passionist Father Simon of Cyrene Bourke, an orphan from St John’s who headed for the Presentation Retreat rather than St Michael’s Ag and Trade upon graduation to year four from St Brigid’s School, run by the Mercy Sisters, thereafter St Patrick’s College, run by the Christian Brothers, the last a cesspit of paedophilia on a par with St Stanislaus in Bathurst, was a regular buzzacott, as evidenced by his fellow felons having classified him as ‘very very putrid’.

      That said, I never saw his case file. I couldn’t find his warrant file and I don’t know, if he’s buried, where. It isn’t Rookwood.

      Often in denial and frequently in tears; that’s your typical rocky. Bourke would have been about as popular with fellow scumbags as Pell’s housemate Gerald Ridsdale, the priest who in 1982 installed a fourteen-year-old boy in his Mortlake presbytery bedroom.

      A mullion from a gabled bay at Cappoquin in Munster

      A rosary of ebony, an omega and alpha

      Embroidered on a chasuble the colour of alfalfa

      No longer cut the mustard for Breadalbane or Taralga

      But say what you will of Sister Pat

      She’d spank your arse and leave it at that

      While you still have eyes, before they are covered in dust, fill them with tears. To mourn and shed tears is a gift of the passionless. If the tears of a man who for a time weeps and mourns can not only lead him to passionlessness but even completely clear and free his mind of all memory of passions, what can be said of those who day and night exercise themselves in this doing with knowledge?

       St Isaac of Nineveh