A witness told how she had hoped she would be protected when the nun walked in on the assault in 1970, when she was eight, but was instead called a “whore”, grabbed and thrown towards a wall.
Theresa Tolmie-McGrane said she was then given a “real hiding” by another nun and threatened with having her other arm broken if she told anybody what had happened.
Ms Tolmie-McGrane waived her right to anonymity at the Scottish child abuse inquiry to recount a catalogue of other abuses during her 11 years at Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark, South Lanarkshire, which closed in the 1980s.
These included beatings, humiliations, freezing showers and children being force-fed inedible food, being told to eat their vomit and having their mouths rinsed out with soap.
The witness told the hearing in Edinburgh how she arrived at the institution, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, at the age of six in 1968 after an abusive early childhood.
She recounted how, about two years later, she had a job dusting pews in the church.
One particular priest would arrive early and ask her to sit on his lap, before progressing to making her to perform a sex act on him or watch as he did so, the inquiry heard.
“He said ‘I need you to be a soldier of God, a good little soldier’,” she told the inquiry, adding the abuse went on for several months.
On one occasion, a nun walked in to the room as it was happening, she said.
She told the hearing: “I thought ‘praise the Lord, she’s…
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