Torture, rape and beatings.That’s the story of Roman Catholic Ireland in the 20th century.
No one will ever know the true tally of evil in this catalogue of unredeemed sin, but the miracle is that not every victim committed suicide or went insane.
Among the survivors are the 1,090 men and women who gave evidence to the nine-year Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.
Their nightmare story is at last being told, but still the perpetrators have not been named, and may never be brought to justice.
“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys,” says the report.
“Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”
The authorities failed repeatedly to do anything effective about the systemic abuse of children.
Many of these poor children were in the care of the Catholic Church in the first place – mostly the Christian Brothers for boys and Sisters of Mercy for girls – only because of truancy or petty crime, or because they were unmarried mothers or their infants.
Brotherhood there was none, nor much quality of mercy.
In all, 30,000 children were sent to these state-funded and mostly Church-run institutions, and the last one did not close down until the 1990s.
It would be no exaggeration to call this a holocaust of abuse. Time after time, victims complained, even though in most cases merely speaking out constituted an immense act of courage. And time after time, Catholic priests, monks and nuns claimed the accusations were lies.
Almost beyond belief, in a month in which British MPs were named and shamed about their expenses, there will be no prosecutions of those perpetrators who are still alive, or naming of those who are dead. The Christian Brothers in 2004 won the legal right to anonymity for all those responsible.
The Holy See and leaders of the Irish Church continued their shameful silence as the report was published, seeking time to read it in detail before commenting.
Only the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who led the efforts of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales to put their own house in order in this area, was prepared to say anything.
“In this country now we have a very steady and reliable system of co-operation with police and social services who actually now hold us in good regard. They know that we are reliable and trustworthy partners. Those that abused the trust that was placed in them should be brought to public account,” he said in an interview with ITV’s News at Ten to be broadcast on the eve of his installation at Westminster tomorrow.
Neither that nor the anonymity of perpetrators is likely to be enough to save the Church from the effects of the widespread revulsion that will result from this report. If anything, the protection the Christian Brothers have secured will merely add to the disgust.
Everyone will be asking, Catholic or not, how these superficially holy men and women could square their actions with their human conscience, never mind their Christian one.
The only ray of light is that the abuse has now stopped. In the UK, the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, the Church has by and large woken up to its staggering sins of commission and put itself in order.
This has happened too late to save the victims, and possibly even too late to save the Church, especially in Ireland where vocations and attendance are in freefall.
Even friends of the Church must be asking themselves, on reading this terrible litany of shame, whether the Church is worth saving at all.
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