Overshadowed by Mount Cashel: This school abuse survivor says Grade 7 was a nightmare

The sky over St. John's on this October morning is thick with dark clouds as a blue sedan slowly pulls into an unremarkable parking lot on Patrick Street. The older man at the wheel is expressionless as he guides his car to a stop.

He takes a second to compose himself, opens his door and plants his sneaker-clad feet onto the damp asphalt. Smartly, he stands erect.

Looking to the back of the parking lot, where Holy Cross all-boys school once stood, he feels a chill unrelated to the threatening skies overhead.

It's the first time he's stepped on this ground in 55 years — kept away by an invisible force field energized by pain, anger and shame.

"This is where it happened," he says while sitting on a wooden bench at the base of a granite monument located at the entrance to the parking lot. Emblazoned on the monument is the Holy Cross crest — an interlaced H and C inside a renaissance-shaped shield — and the school rallying cry — "One And All Crusaders" — is carved in big letters beneath the crest.

At the base of the monument is an oversized bronze plaque planted into the ground, surrounded by a bed of walkway pavers. It features the school's motto, Viriliter Age, which is Latin for "Act Manfully." The more inclusive translation is "Act Courageously."

In its heyday, when it was run by the the Irish Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, and before it burned to the ground just before Christmas 54 years ago, Holy Cross was known for its impressive athletics programs. But all the symbolism adorning the monument has a different meaning for the man — we'll call him Joseph — standing in its shadow on this day.

His abuser was a God-like authority figure in the eyes of many — Brother Larry Angel, the school's principal. And Joseph came from a deeply religious but poor household that was rat-infested, where two large families shared one bathroom, and it was a constant battle to keep food on the table and the cold air outside.

No one questioned these men of the cloth, he says, and he feared telling his mother, who went to her grave more than two decades ago without ever knowing the horrors her son endured. The only sign of trouble his mother would have observed, he says, was her son failing Grade 7. Up to that point, he was an exceptional student.

With his report card in hand, Joseph's mother marched him down to the school for an explanation from, who else, the principal. In the end, he was forced to repeat Grade 7, and though he managed to block out the abuse for many decades, he went through life feeling like a powerless, voiceless victim.

"I still to this day can't believe what that man did to me, and other boys I'm sure," he says.

Joseph is in his 70s, and cannot be identified because of a court-ordered publication ban. He's one of 200 to 300 abuse survivors — hundreds more have died, or refused to join the legal battle — awaiting compensation from the Roman Catholic Episcopal Corporation of St. John's following a decades long fight for justice.

Most were abused during their time at Mount Cashel, an orphanage in St. John's that, like Holy Cross, was run by the Christian Brothers, an order of non-ordained men in black robes and white collars who take vows of celibacy and serve God through areas such as education.

WATCH | A sexual abuse survivor recalls how his nightmare started: