Sisters of Nazareth
Members live in "Nazareth Houses" in English-speaking countries around the world: the UK, Ireland, United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
[2] By the time of her death in June 1878, Larmenier had founded eight other Nazareth Houses in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
[6] By the close of the first decade of the twenty first century, the Congregation operated 15 care establishments for older people in the UK and a number of services for children.
Allegations of cruelty and sexual abuse were made in 1998 about Nazareth Houses in Tyne, Sunderland, Plymouth, and Manchester in England, Swansea in Wales, and Aberdeen, Glasgow, Midlothian and Kilmarnock in Scotland.
A report was published on allegations of abuse and brutality at one of the order's homes in Queensland, Australia, over a 90-year period ending in 1976, including 48 children who were part of the British government Child Migrant Programme.
[10][11] The senior counsel to the Inquiry criticised the nuns' "haphazard and piecemeal" evidence, but acknowledged that the information was old and not stored in a single orderly archive.
"[12] In early 2014 the Sisters of Nazareth admitted that some children had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Northern Ireland that they controlled, and apologised unreservedly.
[16] Nazareth House in Aberdeen faced similar allegations from former inmates: sexual and physical abuse, children forced to eat vomit, bedwetters made to hold soiled bedsheets over their heads and separating siblings.
[17] Archbishop Mario Conti was a regular visitor to Nazareth House in Aberdeen denied that siblings were separated.
In 2003 he took police, a solicitor and Nazareth house officials back to his old room, where, hidden behind a plywood panel, were notes on paper written by him 26 years earlier.
Helen Cusiter revisited Nazareth house in 1996, and the sight of one nun, Sister Alphonso triggered a lot of traumatic memories.
Helen Howie, a 77-year-old woman who had been raised in the orphanage and later worked there as a helper, still remembers the blood on Cusiter's face.
[17] A former resident remembered that a girl named Betsy Owens had drowned on a visit to Aberdeen beach while on an exchange from Nazareth House Cardonald, Glasgow in the summer of 1955.
In autumn 2000, Sister Alphonso, appearing as Marie Docherty, was convicted of four charges of cruel and unnatural treatment.
[18] In 2019 the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry issued a report on the Sisters of Nazareth orphanages in Aberdeen, Cardonald, Lasswade and Kilmarnock in Scotland.
They concluded that between 1933 and 1984, children who had been in the care of Sisters of Nazareth orphanages had encountered sexual abuse "of the utmost depravity."[19].
"[22]: 15:22 Others angry at the institutions' apologies included Caroline Farry, who attended St Joseph's Training School in Middletown from 1978-1981, overseen by nuns from the Sisters of St Louis,[22]: 15:04 Pádraigín Drinan from Survivors of Abuse,[22]: 14:55 and Alice Harper, whose brother, a victim of the De La Salle Brothers, had since died.
[22]: 14:55 Peter Murdock, from campaign group Savia, was at Nazareth Lodge Orphanage with his brother (who had recently died); he likened the institution to an "SS camp".
