After a nine-year investigation, the Irish Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse recently published a 2,600-page report on decades of rapes, humiliation, and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland's castaway children.The investigation uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of rapists and pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
The report found that molestation and rape were 'endemic' in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger.
Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
The Catholic Church in Ireland says it would continue to protect the identities of clergy accused of abuse — men and women who were never reported to police, and were instead permitted to change jobs and keep harming children.
Since 1999, the Irish government has paid 12,000 survivors of the schools, orphanages and other church-run residences an average of $90,000 each — on condition they surrender their right to sue either the church or state.
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