Victims spokesman John Kelly gives his reaction to the report

An inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland has found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions.

It also found physical and emotional abuse and neglect were features of institutions.

Schools were run “in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff”.

The nine-year inquiry investigated a 60-year period.

About 35,000 children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses up to the 1980s.

More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse they suffered physical and sexual abuse while there.

Police were called to the commission’s news conference amid angry scenes as victims were prevented from attending.

More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than the other male orders combined.

The report found child safety was not a priority for the Christian Brothers who ran the institutions, the order was defensive in its response to complaints and failed to accept any congregational responsibility for abuse.

Ritual beatings

The report said that girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

The five-volume study concluded that church officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders’ paedophiles from arrest amid a “culture of self-serving secrecy”.

It also found that government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.
   
The reformatory and industrial schools depended on rigid control by means of severe corporal punishment and the fear of such punishment
Mr Justice Sean Ryan

The commission said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

“The reformatory and industrial schools depended on rigid control by means of severe corporal punishment and the fear of such punishment,” it said.

“The harshness of the regime was inculcated into the culture of the schools by successive generations of brothers, priests and nuns.

“It was systemic and not the result of individual breaches by persons who operated outside lawful and acceptable boundaries.

   
CASE STUDY
“You’d be up at 6am and you had to go to two Masses,” said Sadie O’Meara, a 15-year-old Tipperary girl working in Dublin.

“Your cell door was locked every night when you went in and you had a bucket and an iron bed and you couldn’t look out the window. It was all bars.

“The food was absolutely brutal. And my mam died but they never told me she died. She died on Christmas Day but they never told me.”

Ms O’Meara was speaking to Shane Harrison of BBC News in Dublin
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“Excesses of punishment generated the fear that the school authorities believed to be essential for the maintenance of order.”

The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognise past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counselling and education to victims, and improving Ireland’s current child protection services.

Its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report.

No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.

In their new book, “God Is Back,” John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, that magazine’s Washington bureau chief, argue that religion is “returning to public life” around the world, that “the great forces of modernity — technology and democracy, choice and freedom — are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it,” that these days “religion is playing a much more important role in public and intellectual life.” They assert that “religion is becoming a matter of choice,” something that individuals themselves decide to believe in instead of something imposed upon them, and that “the surge of religion is being driven by the same two things that have driven the success of market capitalism: competition and choice

One of the problems with “The Right Nation” was that the authors selected information and examples that supported their thesis, while ignoring or diminishing data that contradicted it, and they employ a similarly flawed methodology in “God Is Back.”

In arguing that “religion’s power” has “continued to increase,” they contradict considerable evidence to the contrary. (The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released this month, found that “the U.S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.”) In arguing that modernity and religion are compatible, Mr. Wooldridge and Mr. Micklethwait play down that Osama bin Laden and other radical jihadis embrace highly puritanical, backward-looking forms of Islam that stand in direct opposition to much of modernity. (The authors also fail to grapple with the anti-progressive impulses of Christian and Jewish fundamentalism.) And in arguing that religion is increasingly a matter of choice, they ignore the plight of people (like women under Taliban rule) who are forced to live by strict religious codes they themselves may not believe in.

from New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/books/31kaku.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1