Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Report

As expected the report released today by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse on institutions run by Catholic congregations and orders is horrifying and paints a truly terrible picture of the Roman Catholic Church - which was well aware of the widespread sexual and physical abuse of children and chose to cover it up and protect their own. Sadly, I suspect that if a similar commission and investigation of Church run facilities in other countries were conducted the results would be similarly shocking. Truth be told, the Catholic Church hierarchy is an evil institution that cares nothing for the lives of children but everything about power, money and appearances. I hope this report puts the final nail in the coffin of the Church's influence in Ireland. Here are some highlights from the Irish Times:

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THOUSANDS OF children suffered physical and sexual abuse over several decades in residential institutions run by religious congregations, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has found.

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The report published yesterday describes how children lived in “a climate of fear” in the institutions and finds that “sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions”. Cases of sexual abuse were hidden by the congregations that ran the institutions and offenders were transferred to other locations where they were free to abuse again, the report says.

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Eight chapters in the report are devoted to the Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the State. More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than all other male orders combined.

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The commission, which was set up in 1999, investigated industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, institutions for children with disabilities and ordinary day schools. It heard evidence covering the period from 1914 to the present but the bulk of its work addressed the period from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.

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Accounts of abuse given in relation to 216 institutions are detailed in the report, which runs to nearly 3,000 pages. More than 800 priests, brothers, nuns and lay people were implicated. The final cost of the commission may be over €100 million.

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The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is separate from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, which has received some 15,000 applications. It is expected the total cost of awards by the board will exceed €1 billion, of which €128 million has been contributed by 18 religious congregations.

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Another article in the Irish Times went on to state as follows:

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[T]the abject failure by most of the congregations to accept any responsibility for the abuse has been identified repeatedly by the commission. In this respect, its findings are targeted directly at the current leadership within these organisations. Again in the case of the Christian Brothers, the report draws a pointed distinction between the evidence of contrition given by many individual Brothers who had worked in the industrial schools, and the attitude of blanket denial coming from those who are currently in charge of the congregation.

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The commission describes a range of problems encountered when dealing with the Christian Brothers: assertions “known to be incorrect or misleading”; relevant facts omitted; and a policy of denying that a Brother was ever in an institution where “a complainant had got a name even slightly wrong”.

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This asks important questions of us as a society: are we simply to sweep this under the carpet, to conveniently agree that everything is much better today? Or should we instead look to change a system where so much of the educational and care provision for our children is farmed out to organisations who are unaccountable and now proven to have a long track record of abuse and cover-up?

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[W]hat the Ryan commission report has done with great thoroughness is to give us a compelling vision of the hell to which so many children were consigned. It is up to ourselves as a society to demand from Government a series of guarantees, constitutional in part, to ensure that it is never again repeated.

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What is sad that I an so many others allowed thoroughly the morally bankrupt Roman Catholic Church to brainwash us, fill us with self-hate, and denigrate us - all the while as the Church covered up massive amounts of sexual abuse of children and other cruelty and violence against children. When will more people wake up to the evils of this institution and begin to demand full accountability?