“You next?” asked the man next to me. He had traces of silver in his hair, somewhere in his 50s. “No, after you,” I said, before we started talking. I told him my name. I didn’t expect what came next. “You’re not related to Peter Orr by any chance? THE PRIEST?” “Well, yes, he was my uncle,” I told him, as an age-old sense of embarrassment began to well up within me. “There’s no relationship I’d be proud of if I were you,” said my new acquaintance who, as it turned out, had been a student in the 1960s at Wimbledon College, the Jesuit school in southwest London where my uncle had taught. and where, I was told in the chatter of the bar-room, he had acquired the reputation of a man with a preference for young boys. Dazed but not completely surprised, I listened, wanting the conversation to end. I looked around for my friend who, thankfully, had just arrived. I ordered two pints and said goodbye. Uncle Peter – Father Peter Orr – was my father’s older brother. Peter, whose visits to my childhood home near Dublin I loathe. Peter, teacher and pedagogue: he once returned a letter I had dutifully written to him from boarding school with my grammar and spelling mistakes circled in red ink. The eccentric Peter, who embarrassed me so much as a teenager by telling our family history to strangers on buses and in cafes. Peter, the serial pedophile, turns out. The news of Peter’s death in 2010 reached me via email from my mother in Ireland and a cousin in Australia. My family and I have just arrived in Darjeeling after a week of trekking in the Himalayas, one last jolt before the end of my 11-year stint as a foreign correspondent in south Asia. I remember thinking that the former colonial outpost would be a place where my uncle – and indeed his entire family – would feel at home. The seven children – including my father – had grown up in what was then Malaya, where my grandfather was a rubber planter between the two world wars. The last time I saw Peter – a dinner at home with my wife in London – he presented me with a military baton that had belonged to his uncle, who had drowned when his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Italy in the first world war. Thinking there might be more relics after his death, I called the Jesuit home in Preston, Lancashire, where he lived his last years, introducing myself as his only nephew. “We have got rid of all his possessions,” said the priest who had received the summons, “there is nothing left for you.” No condolences were offered. I remember thinking that it was as if the residents of the house wanted to purge themselves of all memory of Peter Dennis Orr SJ. He had died, after a period of ill health, at the age of 85. It was only after a few years, remembering the conversation with the man in the London pub, that I thought of doing an internet search for my uncle. There I found a two-part blog by another former student at Wimbledon College, the first part of which was titled, “In which the author dances poorly on the grave of Father Peter Orr SJ and fails once again to single-handedly destroy the Roman Catholic Church ». Apart from declaring a visceral hatred of Peter Orr, teachers and the Catholic church in general, the author is vague in his accusations. “I’m sure he never touched me or acted out of propriety [sic]”, he writes, “although he was famous for going into the showers after rugby and insisting the boys throw in their towels.” While my uncle seems to have been instrumental in the author’s expulsion from school, there is an ambiguity to this as well: “In March 1968, a few months before my O-levels, I was expelled after losing my temper in class and telling Father Orr to jump and that if he came anywhere near me I would hit him. I really have no idea how it came to this.” I remembered his mold and felt nauseous. We weren’t close but he kept alive the memory of the father I never met The second part of the blog is potentially more damning. In it, the author says he heard from a man in the US who, while trying to track down “a priest who had abused him in Philadelphia in the early 1980s,” came across an obituary of Father Peter Orr whom he thought that he recognized from the accompanying photograph. This was the priest, the American believed, who had “treated” him and then “started coming” to his house while his mother was out. The blogger wonders if he has somehow “denied” the interference he may have suffered at school. This she rejects: “The abuse I received was not sexual, just an ongoing brutal assault on my mind, body and spirit.” A comment on the first part of the blog reinforces the accusations against my uncle. “Orr barked,” writes the commentator, “with an uncontrollable temper. I saw him attack a kid once and smash his glasses in his face.” Despite what I had read, I hesitated about what to do next. I mentioned the blog to a cousin of mine in Canada who begged me to let it rest. Her ailing mother Alison – Orr’s last surviving sibling – would be devastated by the allegations. I remembered how upset Alison had been at Peter’s behavior when, a few years earlier, he had come to Ireland to help with their sister Daphne’s funeral arrangements. There was a story about her drunkenly fondling one of her friends after the service. The unfortunate woman lost an earring in a fight with my uncle on a couch. Alison, horrified, immediately returned to Canada. Respecting my cousin’s concerns about her mother’s ill health, I dropped the subject. It wasn’t until late last year, with the last of the Orr brothers dead, that I decided to call the Jesuits. My first point of contact was Father Paul Nicholson, the order’s communicant in Britain – the deputy provincial or second in command. Although I had been raised Catholic, I had fallen by the wayside, forgetting much of what I once knew about the church. The Society of Jesus – as the Jesuits are officially called – is the largest Catholic order of men in the world and is headquartered in Rome. It was founded by a Spanish priest, Ignatius of Loyola, in 1540 and today, according to the order’s website in Britain, is engaged in “evangelism and apostolic ministry” in more than 100 countries. “Peter would call a meeting maybe once a year”: David Orr with his uncle in 2001, Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland. Photo: courtesy of David Orr The Js, as my mother always called them, were especially big on education, helping to form – as they see it – “the whole person”, mind, body and spirit. Despite our family connections, I was sent to a boarding school run by the Benedictines (who also practiced corporal punishment on their charges, although they are said to have had less fun than the Jesuits). I explained to Nicholson that I wanted to know more about my uncle. He said it was not possible to release the personal records of members of the order until 40 years after their death, but he sent me my uncle’s CV and asked if he could help further. I had not prepared enough to find myself talking to one of the leading Jesuits in the country, someone who from the beginning seemed quite open and helpful. When I told him about the online accusations against my uncle, the socius offered to “speak to the provincial”, his superior and head of the Jesuit order in Britain. A short time later, I spoke again on the phone with Nicholson, who admitted that he had received “numerous reports” of sexual abuse by Peter Orr. I remembered my uncle’s smell and felt nauseous. Although he wasn’t someone I felt particularly close to, he was – apart from my mother – the only person who really kept the memory of the father I’d never met alive. Unlike his other siblings, who all lived abroad when I was a teenager, he came to Ireland often and tried to stay in touch. He had loved my father (“Your poor papa”) and for that I was grateful. Peter Orr existed on the periphery of my family’s life in Ireland, making occasional appearances at the home in County Dublin where, until my final year of university, I lived with my mother, her second husband, their two children and grandmother my. In my younger years, I found his visits tiresome. From time to time he took me on tours of dusty libraries and dark churches. He introduced improvement books – encyclopedias and dictionaries – with exhortations to thoroughness. As I grew older, I came to see him as a bit of a character, an odd man, but not without some Dickensian charm and academic appeal. He liked to talk about books and travel, and if his views on the world were dogmatic, I was relieved that he never took me to task for my lack of religious faith. Like some, though not all, of his siblings, Peter Orr seemed a rather sad person. They never had much of a home life, having gone to boarding school in Ireland or the UK at a young age. Once, when their parents returned home from Malaya, the children failed to recognize them. Peter and his older brother George then joined the Jesuits in Britain. Daphne tried to become a nun but was rejected. another sister, Cynthia, suffered from depression and ended up in a care home in Northern Ireland. Two sisters were considered “normal” by my mother: Marjorie, who had married and immigrated to Australia with her husband and daughters, and Alison, who had married in Canada and had a daughter. My father, Tony, my mother pointed out, was also loving and “normal”, despite the fact that he had a hard time at the hands of priests and nuns whose…
