Irish Catholic abuse-

[tiredemma]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8060442.stm

Im surprised it hasnt been mentioned on here.

Very sad- Disgraceful

Have namechanged for this.

I grew up in Northern Ireland.I have not one single memory of my mum cuddling, kissing me or telling me she loves me. Our relationship since I was a teenager was disastrous. She was unable to show any affection and I felt utterly rejected.

I had all but written her off as a cold bitch who didn't love me until......one new years eve a few years ago. Piss-up at my aunties and me and mum having a drunken heart to heart and she told me that she was abused from the ages of 9 to 12 by a priest who was a very close family friend.

Her parents trusted him implicitly (as everyone did all priests in Ireland in those days) and he took her on day trips where he sexually assaulted her in the back of his car.

I now feel nothing but love and sympathy for my mum. I know and understand exactly why she has the problems she does with expressing love.

If the animal were still alive I'd pay him a visit myself.

Unsurprisingly I am now an ardent Atheist.

The Catholic Church is, like any other religion, nothing more than a crutch for the weak.

Look at what they have let happen in the past, allowing perverts to get away with ruining the lives of children, protecting the paedophiles rather than the kids. Look at what they are letting happen today in Africa.

Corrupt, greedy, superscillous, patronising and ignorant are just a few of the words that spring to mind when I think of the catholic church

Interestingly I went to a convent school. Out of the scores of priests I encountered during my time there only 2 of them were imo decent human beings. One of them left the church in my final year and is now married with 3 kids. The other left the church too and emigrated. This has always struck me as poignant.

Upwind I'm surprised that you are so irrational. How can you possibly believe that any school can have a culture of cruelty solely because of its headteacher? No headteacher operates in a vacuum. The HT in question, was supported by the governing body (the local priest being its chair), the diocese, the bishop, the other staff members and the parents, all of whom were fully aware of the culture of the school and accepted it.

Why is it irrational to point that out?

Chocolate - I too am catholic, but your response is how catholics always behave whenever anything bad comes out about the church. Catholics wil seek to minimise by saying that it wasn't everyone, there are lovely priests etc, stop spreading hatered.
This is a time for the church to step up, to say it was disgusting, that names will be named. That the church will change from root to branch so this never happens again ( starting by checking what all those priests who were sent to developing countries to avoid scandal have been up to).
Each catholic ought to stand up and be counted and demand that this not be allowed in their name.

I am Irish and Catholic and am horrified by the ongoing scandals in the church. I went to a convent primary and secondary school in the late '70s onwards and I have to say although there were a few scary characters around for the most part the nuns were kind, caring people. It is not fair to judge them all for the crimes of others.
I'm in no way excusing anything that happened but I do remember kind nuns feeding and providing clothes and books for those that needed it. A lot of these women dedicated their lives to God and to helping others and I wouldn't like to see that belittled.

pagwatch Your story is a good example of the good and bad sides to the nuns.

pagwatch , It is a great shame and pity that your mum cannot understand that just because she came across a couple of abusive nuns, does not mean all are the same.
Yes, the nuns' behaviour should be condemned but so does your mum's attitude ( this specific attitude, not your mum , probably lovely as you say, otherwise).
Had your mum met my late great aunt, the most gentle caring person ( cliche but true, she dedicated her life to caring for disabled people )would she not speak to this ' effing bitch' and hideous woman ?

I've just been chatting to my childminder about it. She's a lady in her 60s who went to school as a child in Donegal. She is still Catholic but she said she is finding this all very upsetting as she says she was nearly killed at school. Her crime? Being left-handed. She said that there were three priests and nuns that everyone was petrified of, and beatings were a daily occurrence. She says she still is amazed when she picks my boy up from school and all the children come out chatting and laughing, and obviously happy and not frightened like she was. She also told me a story (and I have my doubts, but hey, who knows?) that when she was 6 or 7, her classmate was beaten one day, and then dropped dead a few hours later. Her solution is that they should let the priests marry, and its a mortal sin to make young men in their prime stay celibate, and maybe a wife would keep them normal. [] Its a theory anyway! Anyway, I thought it was interesting to hear her perspective.

Of course there are acts of kindness but that doesn't excuse anyone from actively concealing what went on. It';s clear form the report that the CB intended to run their schools in this manner, it was no accident. Everyone in the CB must have known.
So why did they say nothing? Why did they continue to be associated with an organisation that sytemically abused children. I know I wouldn't.

Litchick, Why shouldn't I say that 'it wasn't everyone, there are some lovely priests'...

That would be utter disgusting betrayal to many YES, LOVELY priests and nuns I came across in my life, known on a very personal level,friends. What sort of creature would I be to deny them this ?

This is not about whether some priests and some nuns are nice or nasty. By the law of averages, I'd expect most of them to be nice (because I believe most people are nice).

It's about whether the catholic church as an organisation, is going to ally itself with the victims of systematic abuse, or with the perpetrators of that abuse.

So far, it has always done the latter. Which ain't a pretty sight.

chocolatekitten: no-one, certainly myself, are suggesting that people shouldn't be free to practice whatever religion they choose. What I am absolutely attacking is institutionalised religion and everything it represents, of which the Catholic Church is the archetype.

You're absolutely right, many other institutions have shown themselves to be corrupt and barbaric. Religion sadly does not have the monopoly on that, although I'd say that only governments/ quasi-governments and nation states have managed the level of damage to society - I struggle to compare, for example, the failure of social services in monitoring childcare to several decades of institutionalised child abuse.

However, even with these institutions there are several key differences which make the Church far worse.

• there is no single government or state which can consistently been responsible for the same level of failure to respect for basic human rights as the Church. Not one. The Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire lasted merely hundreds of years. The Church, on the other hand has been free to do this for close to two millenia.

• governments and states can be changed or stopped be it through democratic process, at the point of a gun or through popular revolution. There are therefore implicit checks on their power. The Church has none. Its power is unchecked and unanswerable.

• government and states do not pretend that they are acting for a greater good. Certainly, historically they've not even pretended that they're acting for the good of anyone but themselves. The Church on the other hand pretends that it's acting in the name of God which allows it free licence to do as it chooses. If you oppose it, you are acting against God.

That religion causes wars, torture, abuse and a hundred other degradations is almost neither here nor there. As you rightly say, people can achieve this to an extent without religion. But there has been no single institution which has encouraged and enabled this for so long. And, much worse, allowed those doing so to believe that they're doing so in the name of salvation.

I am sickened by the lack of prosecutions that have come from this report, and the protection the perpetrators of the abuse have from the law: how did they successfully block this is 2004?

If this was a 'cult' and not the Catholic Church, imagine the fury, imagine the prosecutions that would take place and the widespread condemnation of those that participated in the abuse and those that condoned it by covering it up.

It may not have been the majority, there will always be apologists that will say "all the priests/nuns I knew were lovely" but the point is a significant minority were partaking in this, and awareness was evident in all levels of the church and politics.

It makes me sick

I visited connemara a couple of years ago, without knowing about this and one evening my DH and I walked up to a church behind a factory - in the visitors book were hundreds of entries from people who had made a pilgrimage there from Ireland/america etc to visit where family members had died or been abused. Up the hill, tucked away we came upon a graveyard, filled with children's graves.

They deserve justice, not a few hail marys and confession on a sunday.

Cestlavie,

Governments frequently pretend to be acting for a greater good. Hitler did. Stalin did.

Governments are frequently utterly immune to deomcratic processes. Hitler, Stlain agian, and also the empires you cite. I know what we have now is nominally democracy, but I don't think many people feel that elections involve a huge amount of choice. On the other hand, you are utterly free to have ntohing to do witf the Catholic chruch, to be a Zen Buddhist or a militant Dawkinsite atheist or whatever. Youa re clealry exercising that freedom, so it plainly exists.

I like the adroit way you've turned the Church's longevity against it. Can it possibly be that it offers a few rewards as well as all those punishments? Why is it so hard to listen to those who say something of the kind here?

Can it be that the horrible deeds you are so indignant about are not typical, but human evil of a good old bogstandard kind, including the cover-up? Horrible, but no different form any other horribleness in kind.

AL - I see what you're saying, but for me at least, the differenc eis that the Nazi and Stalinest regimes did what they did because they thought in some mad misguided way that it was for the greater good. They thought the evil was worth it iyswim.
But what possible excuse can the Church have for being involved in this? What greater good did it serve, even a delusional one?
I just don't get what the purpose was of running children's homes this way. It's clear it was not a few bad apples who abused children but that the abuse was planned, designed and systemic.

AL - stalin, hitler, empires - their atrocities have been damned, the perpetrators are still being hunted (aging Nazi's are still being headhunted by jewish groups) so that justice can be done.

The catholic church is not immune from criticism and should not be immune from prosecution.

"an it be that the horrible deeds you are so indignant about are not typical, but human evil of a good old bogstandard kind, including the cover-up? Horrible, but no different form any other horribleness in kind."

very true "good old bogstandard" human evil () deserves to be addressed and stopped - not said oh well nevermind look at all the good religion does - the Church needs to face up to this hypocrisy and clean up

Litchick, one of the things I have been told was that it was widely accepted that the children in the homes were 'tainted' in some way. For example, children born out of wedlock were thought of as the product of sin, rather than the harmless children they were. The children were also used as pretty much slave labour to make money for the church, in the laundries, making jewellery etc.

Why is all organised religion tainted by this, cestlavie? The lutheran church split off from the Catholic 500 years ago; they have no nuns, no brothers and no Magdalen laundries. And absolutely no interest in covering up Catholic misdemeanours.

Imo Catholics should be treated like everybody else- i.e. prosecuted.

AL:

Hitler and Stalin did not pretend to be acting in the greater good. They were very explicitly acting in the interests of their country and their barbaric policies were to that end. They did not pretend to care and certainly did not kill and torture people and tell those people they were doing it for the best. As Stalin said "a million [deaths] is just a statistic". The Church, however, promotes love, caring and compassion and has frequently acted in a very different way.

Secondly, other individuals, governments and states who have committed these sort of acts have invariably ultimated faced some sort of sanction for their crimes, certainly in recent times. Be it penury, exile, jail or the firing squad. Ceascescu, put up against a wall and shot. Hitler, dead in a bunker. Pol Pot, died awaiting trial. Mussolini, strung up with piano wire. Duvalier, overthrown by revolution and exiled. What sanctions has the Church or its elders faced?

I didn't say governments or states change through democracy - I said they change through democracy, at the point of a gun or through revolution. And they do. As did Hitler, as did Stalin. There have been many nasty, vicious and abhorrent governments and states over time, but none have last for more than a few decades. They are overthrown and replaced by another. Can you think of one government or state that has been remained largely unchanged for the last couple of hundred years?

And as I also said, people do not need the Church to commit these acts or to allow but there has been no single institution which has encouraged and enabled this for so long.

cory: note, I didn't say all organised religion, I said all institutionalised religion (i.e. those that devolve their power and authority at least in part from their structures).

I would say some of the comments on here are a little too "paint everyone with the same brush"... But as a catholic I 100% think anyone proven to have abused kids, and those who allowed it should face some justice system. The Pope included!

I offer up for consideration one Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor - he was exposed as having moved a paedophile priest around to new parishes rather than reporting the guy to the police and throwing him out of the church.

Let's put him on the list for prosecution as well, shall we?

All this 'ooh, I know some lovely nuns' is beside the point. The whole system was, and is, rotten. You aren't just talking about a few isolated paedophiles, there is cover-up and collusion running through the whole church.

The church has to take responsiblity for that. I say the system is still rotten because the church has not yet admitted everything that went wrong, identified all the perpetrators and those who enabled them, taken steps to punish these people and put right all the wrongs.

AnnieK: you're right. My point is absolutely not that there is anything wrong with religion per se and certainly people should be free to practice any religion they wish anywhere they want. My argument is with the institution of the Church, both for what it has done and allowed to happen and most of all that it has a special status that allows these things to go unpunished.

chocolatek please do one with your controlling handwringing nonsense. You and the catholic church are not one and the same, so get over it!
btw have you ever heard of the Cathars? That's another not so pretty of part Catholic history. Give it a google. Its good to know organisations history methinks.

Excellent article in the Irish Times.

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0521/1224247034262.html?via=rel

Here's a quote that sums it up for me rather well.

The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through ?successive generations of Brothers, priests and nuns?.

There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children ?flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water?. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of ?ritualised? floggings in one institution.

We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name ? torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour ? young girls placed in charge of babies ?on a 24-hour basis? or working under conditions of ?great suffering? in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders ? by its proper name: slavery. It demands a very painful adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children. In the light of the commission?s report, however, we can no longer take comfort in evasions

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0521/1224247034262.html?via=rel

Good find Glastocat