Survivors, advocates, and pastors call for “true repentance” among religious groups that ran schools and homes between 1950 and 1999.
Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.
Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.
Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.
Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.
When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.
“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”
Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.
The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.
On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or …