Thousands beaten, raped in Irish reform schools

Yahoo/AP ^

[nuconvert]

DUBLIN – A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades — and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

Nine years in the making, Wednesday's 2,600-page report sides almost completely with the horrific reports of abuse from former students sent to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions.

It concluded that church officials always shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and, according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many pedophiles were serial attackers.

[karnage]

I don’t condone any sort of misconduct by religious. The Church is a divine institution administered by fallible humans. It is difficult to ascertain the truth behind charges made regarding events of long ago. And many accusations - like those against Cardinal Bernardin in Chicago some years back - are false. The best thing to do is establish and maintain standards and systems that reduce the possibility of future abuses. The Church here in the US has done a pretty good job of that. I don’t know about Ireland.

[Mrs. Don-o]

At the time of peak incidence, which if I remember the John Jay University report, was late 60's - early 80's, some 60% of bishops transfered "credibly accused" priests to new parishes, often after some kind of therapeutic sojourn at one of those attitude-adjustment centers in New Mexico or Maryland, but without later warning the new parish of previous accusations or counseling/therapy history.

I was shocked, sickened by this, and thought then (and still think now) that this is horribly irresponsible AND criminal.

Especially since most child-abusers seem to be serial abusers (there don't seem to be many one-off cases of child abuse) it suggests life imprisonment as an appropriate response. (Whatever happened to penal exile, e.g. to Botany Bay?)

On the American scene, I see no evidence of prosecuting attorneys going after, for instance, any metropolitan School District's correspondance files and personnel records over the past 60 years so they can comb them for evidence of malfeasance. Hofstra University Researcher Charol Shakeshaft --- Google that name and you'll get tons of information --- not only found a higher incidence of abuse percentage-wise in pubic schools than in Catholic institutions, but found the level of vigilance and safeguards far lower.

(From School Reform News:)

"A few years ago, for example, a review of 412 teachers hired by the Cleveland, Ohio school district disclosed only 26 had undergone required background checks. Not only did 192 school employees have felony convictions, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, but 27 of them had three or more."

Evidence of cover-up? Who needs to cover up if nobody is looking?

At least in the last 15 years, Catholic schools/churches is the US have developed the most comprehensive level of background-checks, child-protective measures and supervision of any youth-related services in the world. I expect the Irish church has done, or will do, the same.

I wonder if we'll ever see that level of oversight in the public schools, youth programs, detention centers, and foster care?

[vimto]

From the UK - believe it..the Catholic Church with it's strict Irish slant was pretty harsh in those days. I was caned for not remembering the colour of the priest's vestments on a Monday, and I had an enlightened liberal headmaster. Come to think of it they were red!

What it was like out of sight and out of mind must have been pretty grim.

That said govenmental institutions cannot throw stones.

[Alex Murphy]

Well, I’ll handle this one. I worked Psych in the 90s. It was commonly thought that the sexual abuse of a child WAS a disorder that could be treated and cured. Now we know that’s wrong....So, you expect a religious order to override the Psychs telling them that a person could be treated or cured? They are religious, not doctors.

I'll weigh in on this one. I would have expected a religious order to recognize that raping a child is fundamentally a sinful behavior, before they would believe it to be aberrational behavior. It should be a warning sign to everyone that if a religious order looks to "the Psychs" for expert advice on dealing with known sinful behavior, instead of looking in their Bibles for solutions, they prove themselves to be scripturally deficient if not illiterate. "Religious" order, indeed!

We should not expect "psychological treatment" will end sinful behavior. That's what many bishops have believed, however, and look at what fruit it has yielded - $3,000,000,000 awarded in damages and settlements by Catholic dioceses within the United States alone.

The only thing that ends sinful behavior is repentance. Check your Bible if you don't believe me.

[chris_bdba]

Not always:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/29/eveningnews/main551557.shtml
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Christian-School-Teacher-Caught-in-Sex-Scandal.html
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/religion/christianity/christianpedofile.shtml

[wolfcreek]

That’s really sad. Power corrupts even in the Church.

[ConservativeMind]

Especially since most child-abusers seem to be serial abusers (there don’t seem to be many one-off cases of child abuse) it suggests life imprisonment as an appropriate response. (Whatever happened to penal exile, e.g. to Botany Bay?)

Well said.

At least in the last 15 years, Catholic schools/churches is the US have developed the most comprehensive level of background-checks, child-protective measures and supervision of any youth-related services in the world. I expect the Irish church has done, or will do, the same.

I wonder if we’ll ever see that level of oversight in the public schools, youth programs, detention centers, and foster care?

I would hope all such environments do the same as you have mentioned is being done in Catholic environments.

Sadly, whatever cover ups or lack of checking has been done at the local public school level, that is as far as any of that can go. There is no one in another country or at the national level noting these things and then not turning them into authorities nor taking them out of the private environment, when the Catholic church bishops and above are involved.

Surely there were people at the local level in these Catholic environments that were trying to keep things quiet, just as with some local school administrators, but when the trash hits the fan at the level above a school administrator, it becomes public and legal proceedings occur. In the Catholic church, it is just another level to obfuscate, some of which makes it to the next level, which is obfuscated more, then finally to the Vatican itself which assures it is all finally obfuscated and allowed.

This is the corruption of the hierarchy of the Catholic church that cannot be fixed in any normal way. This does not reflect on individual church attenders save for the fact that they are supporting their hierarchy through their attendance and monies. This is unfortunate, as I believe most to be nothing like the bad example of their leaders.

[marshmallow]

Interesting.

The headline says "Thousands beaten, raped........". An initial perusal of this might lead one to conclude that the beatings were part and parcel of the rape and that the two were intimately linked. In fact, they're two distinct situations but are both included under in the single category of "abuse".

If that is the situation, then I too am an abuse victim as is just about every guy in my class at school. We were beaten regularly for anything and everything but I don't consider myself to have been abused. Given that beatings were dished out liberally in regular Catholic schools, it doesn't surprise me at all that many of these kids at "reformed" schools were given some leather. It might have actually done them some good.

Rape is another thing entirely and I don't have the slightest doubt that the Christian Brothers did harbor homosexuals who were responsible. Which is precisely why the Catholic Church has always ruled that homosexuals should not be admitted to religious life. As usual though, it will be the Catholic Church, not the homosexual perverts who perpetrated these crimes which gets the blame.

Ireland has been a shining light to the world in terms of the priests and religious which it has produced including numerous holy men and women. As usual however, we'll witness the general piling on which accompanies these reports. These stories will be used to reinforce whatever perception of the Catholic Church individuals already hold.

[ConservativeMind]

It is not saying that in bygone days, sexual abuse was seen as a psychological item to be treated or cured. It is simply saying that it was seen as legal in to abuse children, although potentially immoral, and that when it because illegal to abuse children, that the Catholic church unilaterally decided to not only stay silent, but to continue to allow rapists to have contact with potential rapees.

Psychology is a new “soft science” that, I doubt, was around most of the last 2000 years, to be referred to as an authority on how to handle legal and Scriptural concerns.

Psychology is not considered an authority on such matters in Protestant churches.

[ConservativeMind]

“Rape is another thing entirely and I don't have the slightest doubt that the Christian Brothers did harbor homosexuals who were responsible. Which is precisely why the Catholic Church has always ruled that homosexuals should not be admitted to religious life. As usual though, it will be the Catholic Church, not the homosexual perverts who perpetrated these crimes which gets the blame.”

You obviously didn't read the Catholic church's legal defense.

Read post #40 and get back with us.

[ConservativeMind]

I’ll agree that the immorality goes around between Protestant and Catholic churches, but there are no national-level or international-level church entities that are learning of the abuses, hiding them, and then assigning those perverts to places where they can continue their crimes, at least among Protestants.

[ConservativeMind]

I'm sorry, I left out HTML tags and that made my post hard to read. Here we go:

Especially since most child-abusers seem to be serial abusers (there don’t seem to be many one-off cases of child abuse) it suggests life imprisonment as an appropriate response. (Whatever happened to penal exile, e.g. to Botany Bay?)

Well said.

At least in the last 15 years, Catholic schools/churches is the US have developed the most comprehensive level of background-checks, child-protective measures and supervision of any youth-related services in the world. I expect the Irish church has done, or will do, the same.

I wonder if we’ll ever see that level of oversight in the public schools, youth programs, detention centers, and foster care?

I would hope all such environments do the same as you have mentioned is being done in Catholic environments.

Sadly, whatever cover ups or lack of checking has been done at the local public school level, that is as far as any of that can go. There is no one in another country or at the national level noting these things and then not turning them into authorities nor taking them out of the private environment, when the Catholic church bishops and above are involved.

Surely there were people at the local level in these Catholic environments that were trying to keep things quiet, just as with some local school administrators, but when the trash hits the fan at the level above a school administrator, it becomes public and legal proceedings occur. In the Catholic church, it is just another level to obfuscate, some of which makes it to the next level, which is obfuscated more, then finally to the Vatican itself which assures it is all finally obfuscated and allowed.

This is the corruption of the hierarchy of the Catholic church that cannot be fixed in any normal way. This does not reflect on individual church attenders save for the fact that they are supporting their hierarchy through their attendance and monies. This is unfortunate, as I believe most to be nothing like the bad example of their leaders.

[marshmallow]

You obviously didn't read the Catholic church's legal defense. Read post #40 and get back with us.

Post #40? I read the entire article. Twice.

The Catholic Church did not mount a legal defense. The religious orders who ran these institutions did. That's important because it undercuts your worthless conclusion that the Catholic Church is corrupt to the very top. That is pure, unadulterated garbage. There has been systematic protection of abusers within the Church in this country and Ireland by some members of the hierarchy and some religious orders.

The actual stats on the other hand (linked in one of the posts above) of percentages of priests and religious involved and the numbers of bishops who failed to remove these priests and religious from ministry, in no way justify your broad conclusion.

Your statement that the "corruption cannot be fixed in any normal way" is purely wishful thinking. It will be and it has. The Catholic Church will emerge from this scandal stronger, not weaker. That's right, stronger. Despite the scandal which broke in '02 in this country, vocations and conversions are increasing.

You'll have to put the high fives on hold, I'm afraid.

[ConservativeMind]

So, the Catholic religious orders in Ireland that used their odd legal reasoning in national court in Ireland, do not represent the Catholic church? Please explain that to a non-Catholic such as myself. Is it that these “entities” now expelled from Catholicism?

What do you make of the Vatican documents that detail the obfuscation of these multi-national abuses that did make it into the court proceedings in Ireland that show the Vatican knew these things and insisted on not turning this information into authorities? That basically tells me that the Vatican is fully complicit in covering up the crimes.

What of the 66% of the bishops, from the Catholic Caucus thread, that sat on these things, here in the US? Are these specific 66% of the Catholic bishops in the US no longer with the Catholic church or, in fact, were never representing the Catholic church? If so, please explain what entities who work in the Catholic church actually work for the Catholic church.

I must admit, it seems confusing the way you put it.

[chris_bdba]

You are rigth about that. I know a lot of people(20 or so?) who were raised Protestant and in the last 5 years have converted. We always welcome them back to the church. ;)

[Mrs. Don-o]

"In the Catholic church, it is just another level to obfuscate...then finally to the Vatican itself which assures it is all finally obfuscated and allowed....This is the corruption of the hierarchy of the Catholic church that cannot be fixed in any normal way. "

I dispute that this is a distinctively Catholic phenomenon. I have in mind the British private schools (what they call "public" schools, rather confusingly) which were and are notorious for physical and emotional cruelty as well as the routine, almost "expected" homosexual abuse, both by staff and by older male students against younger ones.

One need only think of how much almost all British writers of a certain age (C.S. Lewis, George Orwell) wrote from personal experience of the hell that was the boys' boarding school.

I offer these observations of why, in these much wider milieux of abuse, Catholic institutions are particularly targeted for investigation and public vilification:

• Documentation. Catholic chancery offices and religious orders keep records of clergy from their seminary application to their burial. Medical, employment, and academic records, correspondance, complaints, evaluations, assignments: the record-keeping's all there and it's archived in a way you'll never see with the State Community College or the Summer Camp or the Dept. of Parks and Rec.

• Deep pockets. Bust a member of the Catholic clergy and you can sue the whole Diocese, with all its parishes, schools, property and other assets. By contrast, no public school district will ever have to sell off its schools, offices, equipment, real estate, and maybe go into bankruptcy in order to pay off settlements for incidents that happened in the 1970's and 1980's. You can't sue the state, the county, the district, or the school, and you'd be hard-pressed to get a substantial settlement out of an individual teacher. So there's nothing like comprehensive investigation because there's nothing like comprehensive pay-off.

• The Gotcha Factor. There are many traditionally-moral religious groups in the world, but there is not another institutional church that takes a stand against the Sexual Revolution as detailed, as explicit, and as repugnant to the secular world, as that of the Catholic Church. Name any other group whose doctrines are opposed to nonmarital genital gratification of any sort, divorce/remarriage, contraception, abortion, same-sex jiggery-pokery, and the rest of it. Thus sex abuse charges against Catholic clergy "count" for more --- a lot more --- because of the special frisson of demonstrating that there is no such thing as virtue after all, just hypocrisy.

  This is why a guy like Hustler editor Larry Flynt, who thinks nothing sexual is sinful, offers a million-dollar reward for evidence documenting the sexual indiscretions of conservative Republicans. Flynt is (thank God) one-of-a-kind, but the impulse to drag a churchman or a conservative through the gutter is, I think, a big part of why an outfit like the Boston Globe will quest endlessly after sex exposes of the Archdiocese of Boston but not of (say) the Massachusetts congressional delegation.

None of this excuses clerical corruption. Not a bit. But it does explain why conservatives are always fair game, conservative churches in particular are the designated target, and the Catholic Church is the bull's-eye.

[marshmallow]

So, the Catholic religious orders in Ireland that used their odd legal reasoning in national court in Ireland, do not represent the Catholic church? Please explain that to a non-Catholic such as myself. Is it that these “entities” now expelled from Catholicism?

The Christian Brothers are a Catholic religious order, some members of which violated the teachings of the Catholic Church and the order itself may be complicit in admitting to its ranks men who were unsuitable for the religious life due to homosexual orientation or practice, again, in direct violation of the discipline of the Church.

Is that a clear enough enough explanation of the difference beween these religious orders and the Catholic Church?

What do you make of the Vatican documents that detail the obfuscation of these multi-national abuses that did make it into the court proceedings in Ireland that show the Vatican knew these things and insisted on not turning this information into authorities? That basically tells me that the Vatican is fully complicit in covering up the crimes.

I haven't read the documents, don't know their number and am not privy to how many were not turned over to the authorities, nor their reasons for not doing so, if that is indeed the case. I do know, and I'm sure you do too, the way Pope John Paul II and the present Pope have reacted to these scandals and if you don't, then do a quick search and see. I also note that the Vatican has turned over many documents detailing abusers, which certainly undercuts your argument that the problem can't be fixed.

What of the 66% of the bishops, from the Catholic Caucus thread, that sat on these things, here in the US? Are these specific 66% of the Catholic bishops in the US no longer with the Catholic church or, in fact, were never representing the Catholic church? If so, please explain what entities who work in the Catholic church actually work for the Catholic church

Two thirds of Catholic bishops reportedly allowed those who were accused of abuse to keep on working. That is the situation as I understand it. Corruption is just one possible reason for that. Another is that they thought the problem could be fixed with counseling and that the courts were not the right place to resolve these issues. Another is that they simply didn't believe the accusations or they didn't think them to be important.

None of this rises to convincing proof of your "terminally corrupt" accusation. It's a scandal and a terrible one. Your attempt to damn the entire Catholic hierarchy however, is well wide of the mark.

[Cicero]

Sorry, but there’s less of it in the Catholic Church than elsewhere. And if Ireland is secularized and joins the Culture of Death, there will be a lot more child molestation there than there was before. Just as there is in this country.

[WVKayaker]

I’ll agree that the immorality goes around between Protestant and Catholic churches...

2 Cor 2: 5If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent—not to put it too severely. 6The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. 7Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him. 9The reason I wrote you was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything. 10If you forgive anyone, I also forgive him. And what I have forgiven—if there was anything to forgive—I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake, 11in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes....NIV

[Mrs. Don-o]

See mine at #76.