DAY OF EPIPHANY is a potent and powerful historical novel. Author Jerome J. Bourgault has crafted a compelling story about one of the most shameful episodes in Canada’s history: the abuse and exploitation perpetrated against young women, girls, boys, and babies in Quebec’s Catholic-run orphanages.
Cassandra—or Sandra as she later calls herself—is a nun who leaves her order, unable to contemplate the hideous treatment meted out to the “patients” in her care after the orphanage in which she works is burned to the ground and then rebuilt as a mental hospital. Bourgault carefully and systematically damns the Catholic church and these orphanages more generally: the extreme hypocrisy of confession; the doublethink of claiming to care for the children of single women while accusing them of bringing sin on their institutions by their mere presence; the pressuring of “unwed mothers” to give up their children for adoption, a racket of the most heartbreaking kind; the simple expedient of transferring child rapists to other parishes when suspicion fell on them. The easy collusion with power in the guise of the local authorities during Maurice Duplessis’s tenure as premier of Quebec during the 1950s runs through the work like a mains wire, as does Sandra’s search for justice.
It was not only the orphans who were brutalized; the nuns were, too—from the mothers superior in charge of them, and, all too often, such men who came into their province. Characterization is careful and nuanced, and if the dialogue can come across as convenient (indictments of this or that authority are occasionally just a tad too neat to be fully believable), the overall ambience is not unduly hindered.
The suspense in the book comes from several sources, as a murder and shocking episodes of abuse stud an intricate plot. But one area in which Bourgault cannot conjure any suspense—and wisely does not try to—is in the guise of a priest, Father Normand. It is not hard to work out that Normand, like those around him, also betrays the charges in his care; and that, despite the outwardly forward-looking attitudes he displays, he is just as guilty of abusing his power as his peers. An internal monologue of Normand’s describes a prominent colleague as “a holy pain in the ass for the Church and an insufferable prick overall.” On the surface, Normand is none of these things; and this is exactly the sort of superficially respectable façade that Bourgault takes issue with.
It is going too far to say that survivors like Sandra emerge redeemed from the narrative, though there is a hint of that. It is equally important that perpetrators are punished; and while DAY OF EPIPHANY speaks to that issue in decidedly ambiguous tones, the sheer power of its rhetoric puts it alongside works such as The Magdalene Sisters. Rarely have the stories of such horrific acts been told with such urgency.
Jerome J. Bourgault’s DAY OF EPIPHANY is a powerful, affecting account of life in Catholic-run Canadian orphanages during the Duplessis era.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader