the Catholic Church spent millions of dollars on programs that were supposed to cure molesting priests. Unfortunately, the programs didn't work like the bishops expected them to.

The victims were denied any voice in the process because the Church adopted the rapists' perspective and saw them as worthless scum. Of course it wasn't going to work given that attitude. An abuser could be confident of continued secrecy.


And I will repeat that it is simply not fair to judge the current Catholic Church or anyone by what happened in the mother and baby homes, the industrial schools, and the Magdalene Laundries. These institutions had largely been abandoned by the mid-1980s, and rightly so.

In Glasgow they weren't abandoned because of any change of heart by the Church. The prisoners in Lochburn Asylum organized a mass escape in 1958 which hit the headlines and forced the state to step in. That was well before Vatican II. I suspect the same was true elsewhere - liberation came from the victims standing up for themselves, not by freedom being granted from above.