Roch Thériault and Seventh Day Adventist Ritual Abuse

Variations on a common theme: groups versus cults

Ritual abuse groups share common characteristics as a general rule, despite the fact that they vary wildly in their beliefs and practices.

First, the group is usually headed by a man or men who exert extreme sexual dominance over others within the group. This includes the assertion of exclusive sexual privileges with other members, or a requirement that lower ranking members get permission to engage in sex.

Second, the group’s leaders employ extremely sadistic physical violence and torture to compel obedience and bonding among members.

Third, the leadership employs extreme humiliation through degrading acts like the consumption of excreta-urine and feces.

Fourth, as the group devolves, members and leaders engage in more extreme forms of abuse to prove their devotion to the principles of the group.

Against these four common characteristics, we will examine a Canadian cult leader named Roch Thériault. Thériault’s childhood was defined by his conception—his grandfather raped his mother—which led to his family stigmatizing him. His stepfather was extremely abusive, and Roch promptly dropped out of school in seventh grade, living in homeless shelters in Quebec until he met a Seventh Day Adventist pastor in 1972 and converted from Catholicism.

In 1977, Roch convinced his followers to leave their jobs and families in order to follow him to Sainte-Marie, Quebec, in order to form a commune. Thériault promptly isolated his followers from their families and the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and prophesied that the world would end in 1979. When his prophecy did not come to pass, Thériault pivoted by impregnating nine women with twenty of his children, and proceeded to become more paranoid and abusive.

He disciplined his followers by defecating on them, hitting them with a belt or sledgehammer, which eventually evolved into members being forced to break their own legs with sledgehammers, sitting on hot stoves, and shooting each other with guns. He sexually abused the children in his group, going so far as to nail some of the children to trees. Eventually, Thériault began performing surgeries on his followers, culminating in the 1989 death of Solange Boilard, who died after Thériault forced her to undergo an enema with molasses and olive oil, later cutting her stomach open with a knife and holding her intestines in his bare hands. When Boilard died, Thériault said that he would resurrect her, and he had the cult cut off her skull cap and he ejaculated on her exposed brain.

The resurrection failed, and Thériault had his followers bury Boilard’s body a short distance from their commune. After his follower Gabrielle Lavallée fled the commune and reported him to the police for cutting off part of her breast and amputating her arm, the authorities arrested Thériault and ultimately convicted him for the murder of Solange Boilard, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was later murdered in prison by his cellmate.

Conclusion

The story of Roch Thériault is emblematic of a ritual abuse cult, which inevitably begins with a mainstream religious tradition before its members split off into their own sect. The difference between and a cult may be summed up most accurately by the concentration of power in the hands of one charismatic figure in a cult, rather than the distillation of power among a hierarchy of individuals within a group. The former requires autocracy, the latter requires cooperation.

Ritual abuse cults and groups ultimately demand the same fanatical devotion from their membership, whereby any sense of autonomy is suspended in service of the memberships’ increasingly fanatical and delusional outlooks. The groups almost always demonstrate an insular perspective with religious sects that ultimately causes the group to function within the religion, while the cult will inevitably break away from the religion.

If you suspect that ritual abuse groups or cults are operating in your community, the best approach is to ensure that you and your family are safe. This means not engaging at all with those individuals who are operating with ritual abuse groups or cults, and severing social ties with anyone who continues to affiliate with such groups. Understanding the ecclesiastical processes and rules of your church can ensure that you effectively outmaneuver such individuals and accomplish their excommunication from the church in order to limit their influence and harm.

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