No surprise there

The New York Times has an article by Sarah Lyall about abuse in Irish institutions run by the Catholic Church:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were regularly sexually and physically abused by nuns, priests, and others over a period of decades in hundreds of residential institutions that housed the poor, the vulnerable, and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday. “A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys,” the report said, adding that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions.
The report does not name the accused— who number around 800— because of a lawsuit from the Christian Brothers, the religious order that ran many of the boy’s reformatories. As a result, none of its findings can be used as the basis for criminal prosecutions. The commission was also hobbled by foot-dragging in the Department of Education, which had oversight responsibility for the institutions, and other state organizations that in 2003 prompted the resignation of the commission’s first director. It is no longer so shocking to hear that such institutions were rife with violence and abuse, or that the Catholic and government establishments colluded; this has been openly discussed for years. But the report, by the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, exposes for the first time the breathtaking magnitude of the problem, and shows how an entire establishment in an overwhelmingly Catholic country seemed to collude in perpetuating a cruel and sadistic system.
The report is 2,600 pages long, took nine years to prepare, and reflected the anonymous testimony of 1,060 former students from a range of 216 institutions, including reform schools, orphanages and hospitals, from a period spanning, for the most part, 1930 to 1990. Most of the former students are now aged between 50 and 80.
The boys’ schools were mostly run by the Christian Brothers order of priests and form the largest part of the report. Many of the girls’ schools were run by orders of nuns, like the Sisters of Mercy. Students sent to these institutions, run often more like prisons or workhouses than schools, came from vulnerable segments of society. Some poor families placed their children there because they were overwhelmed. Other children were sent to the homes after they were caught stealing or missing school, or if they became pregnant— even as a result of incest or abuse. The last of the institutions closed in the 1990’s.
Some leaders of the religious orders have dismissed the report as a collection of lies and exaggerations. But victims’ advocates say it finally places the blame squarely where it belongs. “While horrific, widespread reports of abuse and coverup are sadly quite common, the significance here is that a government panel is conclusively saying that the finger-pointing and blame-shifting and excuse-making of the church hierarchy is bogus,” said David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a group based in St. Louis, Missouri. “The notion that highly educated church officials didn’t understand abuse or know it was criminal is a sham,” he said in an interview.
The report also says that in the rare circumstances when the abuse was officially reported— either by the children or their worried parents— the authorities looked the other way.
Speaking of sexual abuse, the report said that sometimes the abusers were moved to other facilities where they could prey on other children. “At worst, the child was blamed and seen as corrupted by the sexual activity, and was punished severely.”
The Most Rev. Vincent Nichols, who is the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, called the revelations “very distressing and very disturbing.” In an interview with ITV news, he said that he felt sympathy for “those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past, which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at.” He added: “That takes courage, and we shouldn’t forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they did.” He said that people who perpetrated the abuse should be held to account, and that the system currently in place would bring to light any new cases of abuse.
Maeve Lewis, executive director of One in Four, a victims’ organization in Dublin, told reporters there that the report was “shocking,” even when taking into account different standards of child-rearing in the past. “These children lived under a regime of physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect,” she said.
The commission was formed in 2000, after campaigns by victims touched off by the broadcast of a television documentary about abuse in the children’s homes. In 1999, Bertie Ahern, then the prime minister, responded to the revelations with a public apology to the victims of the abuse. Ireland, he said, had exhibited a “collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue.” Since then, the issue has been a preoccupation for the Irish people, as the scale of past abuse has become apparent. In 2002, the Catholic Church in Ireland agreed to pay $175 million to compensate victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. A separate group has paid out nearly $1.5 billion to more than 10,000 people who have claimed they were abused in state and church-run institutions.
Wednesday’s report is striking in that it refrains from identifying anyone— either the perpetrators or the victims— by name. Many victims’ groups said that was unacceptable. “If you don’t name names, accountability is short-circuited in this situation— you’re not able to get to the bottom of what happened,” said Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability, an American group that maintains an Internet archive of material related to Catholic abuse. “If you report on a system in which the Catholic Church and the Irish government worked together to create a situation in which children were abused, it’s incumbent on the government to conduct the inquiry in a system where punches were not pulled,” he said.

Rico says that this was old (if sad) news when he was going to Dublin on a regular basis for Claris back in the late 80s. If anyone wonders why he (along with thousands of Irishmen) has no love for the Church, this would be a good place to start...