Catholic Church shamed by Irish abuse report

DUBLIN (AP) - After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe - which was resisted by Catholic religious orders - concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

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Catholic Church shamed by Irish abuse report

I have written about this before and many took it as me taking a cheap shot, and looking for a reason to bash the Catholic Church. Pedophilia in the Catholic Church is a reality. It has been for a very long time! I it would be safe to say that it goes back a lot further than the 1930’s if the truth we known.

It’s not just the priests, there are nuns that have a penchant for altar boys and teen-aged Catholic girls too. It was my experience that priests seemed to prefer the altar boys, but I suppose there were some that liked girls too. The people I speak of, the ones that I know that were molested, or in some cases, almost molested, were not in the care OF the Catholic Church as were the children of the Church-run reform schools of Ireland. For some strange reason, and to the best of my knowledge, there has always been a strain of perversion running just below the surface of mainstream Catholicism.

The Catholic religious orders that ran more than 50 workhouse-style reform schools from the late 19th century until the mid-1990s offered public words of apology, shame and regret Wednesday. But when questioned, their leaders indicated they would continue to protect the identities of clergy accused of abuse - men and women who were never reported to police, and were instead permitted to change jobs and keep harming children.

Again, I have got to say, this IS, to the best of MY knowledge, the status quo within the Catholic Church. Castigate the accuser, defend the accused, pay off the accuser, move the accused to another parish, deny that the incident ever happened, and the beat goes on!

I know, 1st hand, the shame and disgust, the lost trust, the utter shock that was felt when a Catholic priest made an advance towards me when I was 17 years old. I know what it’s like to be threatened because I hit the SOB so hard I cracked his jaw. I know, 1st hand, of nuns that were *party girls* away from the convent. A change of clothes, a quick application of makeup, a hair-do, and voila, Sister So-and-So becomes a rather fetching, and very needy bar patron on the prowl.

I know, 1st hand, of a nun that got pregnant, and was sent to the Mother House to have the child. It was my understanding that the child was then adopted by a very wealthy Catholic family, all of this hidden from the public eye. Not too well hidden actually, it was common knowledge but it was polite to talk about it.

This particular nun was an M.S./R.N., a Masters in Nursing, quite well educated and a certified psychiatric nursing supervisor. She ran the psychiatric unit of a very prominent Catholic hospital in my home town. She was dating, on the sly of course, one of the most respected orthopaedic surgeons in town, he practiced at that particular hospital.

The scandal was awesome, especially when you think of this, it happened in the early to mid 1970’s, and you just didn’t discuss the fact that *father* liked the young boys and *sister* liked whatever she could get.

If you DID discuss it, if you had the guts to take it public, you were called a liar, a blasphemer, you were told that you were speaking the words of Satan and were threatened with excommunication from the Church and legal proceedings. You were the next best thing to a heretic! You were made to feel that YOU were the one that had done wrong. If you were one of their victims you were told it was OK, everyone did it, you just had to keep quiet about it. Any lie was acceptable as long as it was kept quiet and the Church was not shown in a bad light.

That was almost 40 years ago. Maybe the Catholic Church has changed, maybe they have actually cracked down on the predators, pedophiles and perverts in their ranks, maybe not. Maybe they are still keeping it hidden from the public eye as they shuffle the perverts from parish to parish where they are still free to molest our youngsters, corrupt their morals, destroy their faith and steal their innocence.

There are a lot of modern day Catholics that will deny that ANY of this ever happened, they will deny my story, they will deny the story of the former residents of the Irish homes, they will deny ALL of it. But there are some of us that know the REAL truth. There are some of us that will continue to speak that truth too!

And they do their deeds in the name of Christ! The Vatican KNOWS, many members of the Church KNOW, and yet to this very day, it is still buried, shuffled and hidden away as if it never happened!