The news article about the Irish clergy abuse says "girls were routinely sexually abused," yet the report explicitly says on Page 11 that "in general, girls' schools were not as physically harsh as boys' schools and there was no persistent problem of sexual abuse."

More important, the report labels four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. This includes things like "kissing," "inappropriate sexual talk," "being kicked," "inadequate heating," "lack of attachment and affection" and so on; regarding sexual abuse, the most common form was fondling, not rape.

To conflate serious abuse with punitive measures that were not uncommon at the time (82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970) is manifestly unfair.

The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.

The Church cannot and will not fix itself. The very reality of the systemic abuse in the Irish institutions (and elsewhere as well) reveals a deep disdain for people by those charged with leading the Church. There has been an abandonment of the fundamental values that are supposed to vivify the Church if indeed these values were ever really internalized by many in positions of power. There is something radically wrong with the institutional Catholic Church. This is painfully obvious because it allows systemic abuse and radical dishonesty to coexist with its self-proclaimed identity as the Kingdom of God on earth....

The institutional Church is defensively changing its approach to the systematic abuse all too slowly and only because it is forced to do so by external forces it cannot control. The Irish government commission is one and the U.S. legal system is another.