Today, the findings of Mr. Justice Ryan’s report on child abuse in Ireland was released, making news in every paper in every major city in the world. The result is a five-volume report nine years in the making that reads like a horror story of hundreds of individual incidents of child sexual abuse at the hands of the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
These kids were sent into the care of the Church by the state, which then turned a blind eye, essentially, to how the children were treated. Now it’s been blown wide open, and the picture is of child abuse as ‘normal’, not as isolated cases.
Just a few bad apples, they say. And it’s all in the past anyway. Most disgraceful have been the snide suggestions that those revealing their abuse are motivated by compensation rather than the truth. These are the excuses which have been peddled by the religious orders, most notably the Christian Brothers, over the decades.
The culture of violence and sexual abuse in the Ryan report is truly one of the more disgusting things I’ve ever read: not because I’m unaccustomed to hearing about violence — violence is, regrettably, part of human history — but because it was the institutionalized, normalized part of the Catholic Church’s recent history in Ireland. What are these victims to think about society, about life, when it is so unjust and brutal from the very outset, and when any objection they ever had was shut down before it reached any kinder ears than the ones that had listened and ignored?
It makes me very grateful to have been at a state school in Northern Ireland… which, honestly, was still no picnic. To this day I find it astonishing that the morons in charge put 40 of us state schoolers on a public bus at 3:20pm which then stopped and picked up 40 kids from the Christian Brothers school just down the road. When Protestant and Catholic kids are thrown together in a bus in Northern Ireland, the results are not peaceful. Every day for 5 years we were in the grip of fear; every week it was a massacre. What the hell were they thinking? Maybe they had bigger fish to fry than things like… I don’t know, keeping kids safe? Thankfully I escaped those 5 years with only 6 stitches next to my left eye.
But it makes one wonder how much worse it could have been to have been left in the charge of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland instead. Maybe I should have been feeling sorry for some of those Christian Brothers kids rather than fearing our daily encounters on the bus? Or maybe the kinds of abuse described in the Ryan report were mostly history by then.
Either way, it makes for harrowing reading.
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