Report Details Abuses in Irish Reformatories (Sad, Tragic, Obsene, and Evil)

[YankeeClipper (imported)]

Hi All,

QUOTATION OF THE DAY, from the New York Times.

"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys." an Irish government commission (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world ... ?th&emc=th), on abuse in residential schools run by the Catholic Church.

I know that this article does not specifically mention castration (though it does include punishment directed at the genitals), I still think it needs to be brought to the awareness of all of the members of the Archives. It continues to prove the sad statement: "That evil in real life is worse than most of us even think to write about." Worse, this abuse occurred in the 20th century.

Please read (if you can handle the level of anger that it engenders): N.Y. Times Article: Report Details Abuses in Irish Reformatories (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world ... &th&emc=th).

And the report itself: Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Executive Summary (http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/), and in particular, Volume III, Chapter 7, Record of abuse (male witnesses) (http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/03-07.php) and Volume III, Chapter 9, Record of abuse (female witnesses). (http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/03-09.php).

-YC

[Francis (imported)]

What a horrific report!! realpisse What I would like to know now is what was done to bring to justice those responsible for the excessive cruelty and the overt sexual abuse on these children or is it just swept under the carpet like most of these things in the Catholic institutions in order not to sully the reputation of the Church.

There should be no Statute of Limitations on these guys and they should not be allowed to hide behind the skirts of the Pope. They should be hauled into court and prosecuted now even at this late date. A few who have passed on may be roasting in Hell but the rest are still availabe to punishment!!

The remarkable thing to me is that there must have been some very decent people who were aware of what was happening. Why did they not come forward and bring some measure of justice for these victims. I hope it is now not too late to do something about these monsters. At the very least they should be punished in kind by

[bobover3 (imported)]

The report omitted the names of the guilty, which has already become a controversy in Ireland.

These schools were for the "poor, vulnerable, and unwanted." In other words, the powerless. This has less to do with religion than with the universal temptation of the powerful to abuse the powerless. Power is a test of character which only a few pass. Look anywhere some people are controlled by others and you'll find cruelty motivated by vanity and the desire to indulge sordid urges with impunity. Children are especially vulnerable, which is why children unprotected by loving parents are always pitied.

In the US, young orphans or those rejected or abused by their parents are placed in "foster homes." The public imagines caring and benevolent adults who help young people. The reality is that the government pays a monthly stipend for each young person, and some people make a business out of taking several. Far from being accepted as members of the family, these young people are often treated just as the children were in Ireland. They're used for menial labor, ill fed, ill clothed (ups the profit margin), and kept socially distant from the host family. (I've read of foster children forced to eat at special tables, apart from the family, and given special, low quality, food.) Beatings and sexual abuse are common. This is in the US.

Who will speak up for these children? They have no friends or family to defend them, and the government's interest is just pro forma. So it's not just Irish Catholic clergy. The sad truth is that raising children is hard work requiring patience and love, and people who do this for money often have little of either to spare.

[Francis (imported)]

Who will speak up for these children? They have no friends or family to defend them, and the government's interest is just pro forma. So it's not just Irish Catholic clergy. The sad truth is that raising children is hard work requiring patience and love, and people who do this for money often have little of either to spare.

All too true. It is not confined to Ireland or for that matter to Catholic clergy the majority of whom are good and decent people. Your comment about these powerless chidren is a sad truth in most countries. The silence about these matters and the consequences for the victims is just reprehensible in my view and if nothing else an effort myst be made to weed out the abusers of these, the most vulnerable of our citizens.

One of the issues, I think, is that there are a number of these children who would be adopted if a more sensible approach was taken to arranging adoptions. I have friend of impeccable reputation who found out, after a number of years of marriage and trying all the options, that he and his wife could not have children and were were told when they applied, that being in their mid/late thirties, they were now too old to be considered for the adoption of a child in Australia!!! It was a tragedy for them and I am sure they would have been excellent parents. Charge it up to bureaucracy and over zealous administration.:(

[bobover3 (imported)]

I've read that most people who adopt want babies or small children. Once someone is a teen-ager, it's almost impossible to find adoptive parents. Many children are passed from one foster home to another, sometimes as often as once a year. If the children complain, the foster homes can just dump them.

When I was in graduate school, years ago, I rented a room in a house which also took in a teen "ward of the state" in exchange for a monthly stipend. The boy left an unwashed pot in the kitchen sink, so the woman who owned the house just threw him out on the street. He had about an hour to pack and go. I never learned what happened to him. The boy had already shown signs of affection for the woman, treating her as a surrogate mother. What a bitter lesson he learned. Many of these children go on to lead troubled lives as adults.

It's heartbreaking. The children are cowed into silence, and no one much cares what they say. The foster home operators obviously won't indict themselves, and there's no will to enforce careful supervision.

[devi (imported)]

All of these types of abuses have been reported before right here in the United States among both Protestant and Catholic institutions. They were especially prevelant at the latter half of the nineteenth century and at the first half of the twentieth century. They were all especially rampant among the old Indian boarding schools where children were taken away from their parents on the reservations and stuffed into dorms far away from their home being denied contact with their families back home. Many other "natives" here in the southwest were a little bit more fortunate than the others but were still abused by the "missionaries" nonetheless. The missionary fields had been divied up by the US government to the various religious institutions (generally Methodist, Episcopal and Baptist with most tribes, Mormons around Utah and Catholic with a few other tribes and also among the Hispanics of the southwest). This was done in order to "civilize" the backward peoples of the west in their perception. And of course all these abuses that do happen within the church are never completely limited to those of minority status. These are well known to have happened among the white and anglo populations as well. And in fact they are still going on among some of the fundamentalist protestant organizations of this very day even. So sad. So sad.

[augman7518 (imported)]

All of this done in the name of sweet jesus.There was no other solution as the church found money somehow in doing this.I am a recovering catholic because of the far reaching problems of cover up and abuse by nuns and priests.I have two sisters that were improperly touched,if you know what I mean and I had some sexual and physical abuse by nuns in sister school.

This needs to come to a clean finish,even if it distroys the church as it does not deserve to live and cause more danage to its people.

One of the letters mention

ed to hide behind the skirts of the

pope.The pope has the proper name,Benidick.As most priests are gay one might want to ask ,Has there ever benadick in his mouth or benidick up his backside.

[bobover3 (imported)]

I'm an atheist and ethnically Jewish, yet I assure you these problems are not special to Roman Catholicism.

The reason the Church has seen so much of this is that the Church has been extraordinarily active in good works: schools, orphanages, hospitals, charities, and social institutions of all sorts. Because of these many good works, Catholic clergy have come into far more frequent contact with vulnerable people than the clergy of other faiths, which are less active in their communities. To repeat myself, I think this is people falling for the temptation of power. When they think they can get away with it, many people will give in to their most depraved impulses.

I suppose the cult of sanctity which surrounds many clergy helps conceal any crimes they may commit. The community is, or has been, invested in the maintenance of this appearance of sanctity. As an atheist, I must say that this is what comes of worshiping men, not God. As a non-Catholic, it often seems to me that Catholics worship the Church and its clergy more than they do Jesus and his gospel. For many Catholics, it seems to me that the pope *is* God. The Church fans these flames with its doctrines regarding the infallibility of the Church and the pope when he speaks ex cathedra, as if God obeyed the Church's orders, rather than the other way around.

If any Catholic is offended by my writing this, I mean no offense. I'm just trying to understand the culture that allowed so much abuse for so long.