I've had a few thoughts since this reared its head again.

It's become obvious that sexual abusers find their ways to places where children are accessible, no matter what their religion or lack of it. Some men who can take a superior role in a religion, any religion, or denomination, or sect, seem to find it "necessary" to take sexual advantage of anyone available, adult or child. That isn't the whole of what's been happening in this case.

That anyone who has read that it is better to have a millstone round their neck than harm a child feels it appropriate to make a child lick faeces from a shoe beggars belief. That isn't sexual, is it? Sexual is almost understandable by comparison with the cruelty of rubbing salt into the wounds of "punishment".

And it isn't just Ireland. I remember the film of Bernadette Soubirous being treated appallingly in her convent. Wasn't it portrayed as part of what led to her being canonised that she could bear this without protest? (You can't blame the British government for that. Oops, cheap one.)

I've seen the seeds of this desire to humiliate in other places, and in the case of someone who approached a friend inappropriately, a reluctance in the case of someone else in the Cof E to believe it. I am reluctant to look as if I am anti-Catholic. The lovely Irish priest brothers of a neighbour were brilliant at visiting my mother in hospital, when she had stated she did not want any chaplain, because of the behaviour of our Congregationalist minister.

But the spending of money on the defence of the indefensible, the attempt to silence the victims is appalling.

It isn't just the money going to victims that is limiting Joe's ministry, it's the money opposing them.

The other thought is to wonder when it began. If it had been prevalent in the past, would so many people have been drawn to the church - any church? Would so many people have entered the religious life? Wouldn't they run away rather than enter convents where they knew abuse was rife?

I read something about the Magdalene Laundries about the time the film came out. It seems that the old nuns, in need of care, found themselves in the old peoples' homes that succeeded the Laundries, alongside some of their former victims.

Penny