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.
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:
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.