Ah, it's interesting. Here, I'm accused of "looking the other way" and yet many people (mostly conservative lay people) within the Catholic Church condemn me because I question what goes on, and don't give respect to anyone in the church unless they deserve it. I remember one guy who read me the Riot Act because I dared to criticize John Paul II for his writing style (actually, I'm far more critical of JPII than that). I've been called a "cafeteria Catholic" because I don't take everything hook, line, and sinker. Still, most of my experience in the Catholic Church has been very positive.

But with eight years of seminary training and forty years of work in the Catholic Church as a volunteer, I know what's going on - and yes, I am very critical of problems within the Catholic Church, and I've spent a lot of time studying those problems and working to resolve some of them. There's an American Website called http://bishopaccountability.org/ that has a database of priests and other church employees who have been accused of child molestation. I went to school with several of those accused in Milwaukee. Some were "strange" when they were in school, and some were not. I don't know that I would have predicted that any of them would be child molesters, although I knew a few of them very well. I'm not sure anybody can predict who will commit crimes against children, and who will not.

My experience of the Catholic Church in Ireland is limited, although I know dozens of Irish-born priests and nuns who work in the U.S., and I spent two weeks in Ireland and went to Mass in a different church every day that I was there. It was my responsibility to deal with the personnel in each church to make arrangements for our chaplain to celebrate Mass, so I did have significant contact with Catholic Church personnel there. My impression of the Catholic Church in Ireland was generally negative. It seemed rigid and dead, and obsequious to the clergy. I saw little of the joy and vigor and social justice concern that I've experienced in many (not all) Catholic parishes in the U.S. And I have to say that I support Barry's view - in his part of the United States (New England), the Catholic Church seems almost as repressive as it seems in Ireland. Interestingly, the Irish-born priests and nuns I know are generally a good bunch of people who do a lot of good.

Despite Fionn's claims, I'm not glib about the situation of the church-run government schools in Ireland, and I certainly don't look the other way. I've read a fair amount about the subject.

I didn't read the entire report, but I found the executive summary to be very worthwhile reading. I found the "recommendations" section to be excellent, particularly this:

3. The lessons of the past should be learned.

For the State, it is important to admit that abuse of children occurred because of failures of systems and policy, of management and administration, as well as of senior personnel who were concerned with Industrial and Reformatory Schools. This admission is, however, the beginning of a process. Further steps require internal departmental analysis and understanding of how these failures came about so that steps can be taken to reduce the risk of repeating them.

The Congregations (Religious Orders) need to examine how their ideals became debased by systemic abuse. They must ask themselves how they came to tolerate breaches of their own rules and, when sexual and physical abuse was discovered, how they responded to it, and to those who perpetrated it. They must examine their attitude to neglect and emotional abuse and, more generally, how the interests of the institutions and the Congregations came to be placed ahead those of the children who were in their care.

An important aspect of this process of exploration, acceptance and understanding by the State and the Congregations is the acknowledgement of the fact that the system failed the children, not just that children were abused because occasional individual lapses occurred.

The entire list of recommendations is excellent. I recommend that you read them and learn from them.

So, my point in all this is that it does little good to seek revenge or condemnation for something that happened thirty or forty years ago (I gather from the report that most of this ended in the 1960's). The best thing we can do with this systemic atrocity is to learn from it. Some of you won't like hearing this, but it was not only the Catholic Church that is to blame for this - it is all of Irish society. The stories of these institutions have been part of Irish literature for a century, so all of this must have been common knowledge - and people accepted it as "just the way it is."

I think every nation and every society is guilty of at least one systemic atrocity. In the United States, it was slavery and racism and the extermination of Native Americans. Great Britain has much to answer for its history of imperialism. Germany's atrocities are well-known. And yes, the Catholic Church IS guilty of this atrocity in Ireland, of the Spanish Inquisition, and many others.

Yes, it is very important for the current citizens or members of any nation or society to acknowledge and take responsibility for these systemic atrocities that are part of their history - and to learn from them. Unfortunately, we don't want to do that. We feel much more comfortable passing the blame on to somebody else and holding ourselves blameless. I guess that's human nature.


And in this thread, I hear lots of blame, and very little learning or desire for healing. Blame is futile - we need to move forward and realize that it is our responsibility to ensure that such atrocities do not happen again.

And Goatfell, I think you make a good point. Too often, it's easy for us to say we're not capable of abuse or other atrocities - but we all are. It happened in Ireland, and England, and Germany, and the United States - and people said, "That's the way it is." We won't solve any problems until we acknowledge that we all are responsible.

-Joe-