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  The Latest Child Abuse Scandal Is As Irish As It Is Catholic

By Damian Thompson
Telegraph
May 28, 2009

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/2009/05/28/the_latest_child_abuse_scandal_is_as_irish_as_it_is_catholic

One of the most delicate questions surrounding the wicked child abuse by Irish Catholic clergy, brothers and nuns is this: how much of the abuse was Irish and how much of it was Catholic?

The question of Irishness has been hovering over the Catholic abuse scandals for years, ever since journalists noticed (but scarcely dared point out) that they seemed concentrated among the Irish Catholic diaspora of the United States, Canada and Australia. We always knew that terrible things happened in Ireland, too, though it was not until the publication of a 2,600-page report last week that we realised their extent.

The New York Times describes the horror of what happened in the reformatories run in the Irish republic by Catholic orders:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others [ie, brothers, the major offenders] over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted ... The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed.

"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions," the report says. In the boys' schools, it says, sexual abuse was "endemic."

I've held off commenting on this subject. For one thing, I've been too angry at the way The Times of London decided to preface its coverage of Archbishop Nichols's installation with a report of a manufactured row over his (good) response to the Irish scandal. Granted, the Times's misjudgment is a very small matter compared to the decades of sadistic abuse to which Irish children were subjected; but I wasn't alone in detecting a vein of anti-Catholicism in the paper's reporting that further obscured matters. This is, after all, the organ whose religion correspondent earlier this year began a paragraph with the following words (which I have only just come across): "Note to His Holiness, not that he'll ever read it, isolated within his dark and painted necropolis atop the ancient pagan tombs of Rome ..."

The Times also keeps describing the Irish brothers who abused children as "clergy" or "monks". This ignorance matters enormously, because the fact that Christian Brothers and other lay religious are not clergy is crucial to understanding the vicious character of their reform schools.

Back to the original question: how Irish was the abuse and how Catholic? It should go without saying that these crimes are an utter perversion of Catholicism - but unfortunately it has to be said, because the hierarchical structures of the Church made it easy to conceal them, and religious arrogance and paranoia persuaded the authorities that they should be concealed. As the Child Abuse Commission concludes:

The documents revealed that sexual abusers were often long-term offenders who repeatedly abused children wherever they were working. Contrary to the Congregations' claims that the recidivist nature of sexual offending was not understood, it is clear from the documented cases that they were aware of the propensity for abusers to re-abuse. The risk, however, was seen by the Congregations in terms of the potential for scandal and bad publicity should the abuse be disclosed. The danger to children was not taken into account.

No surprises there, I'm afraid. The Catholic authorities in America and Britain carried on moving around known sex offenders in the 1990s, after the scandal of paedophilia was in the public eye and the likelihood of re-offending was well established. The cases documented by the Irish report occurred at a time when bishops and Congregations of religious were a law unto themselves, because very few people cared about abuse and the Irish government allowed the Church to do pretty much what it liked.

I've just asked a well-informed commentator on Irish affairs about the respective influence of Irishness and Catholicism in this scandal. His reply was deliberately provocative: "The violence was Irish, the sex abuse was Catholic," he said.

He explained that Ireland has for centuries tolerated levels of domestic violence and alcoholism that are much higher than those in other Catholic cultures. There's no single, neat explanation for this - but the brutality of English colonial oppression certainly rubbed off on society. Rural Ireland until the 1970s was basically a Third World country; it still had a peasantry (thanks in part to the English) that was, by definition, very badly educated. We'll never know for sure how many fathers of families were violent drunks, but the proportion was high compared to most of Europe. And this is the culturally and intellectually impoverished class from which many of the Christian Brothers were recruited.

It's not just a liberal cliché to say that the cycle of violence works down the generations: the brothers from several Congregations were raised among violence and booze and behaved like their fathers, or their own abusive teachers, once they were in positions of authority themselves. Many of them were not particularly bright: if they had been, they might have become priests, though the chances of them joining the Jesuits - the main teaching order of priests - would have been slim. The Jesuits were middle-class and their discipline, although severe, was less purely sadistic and stupid than the corporal punishment handed out by the lay Congregations.

What did my colleague mean when he said that "the sexual abuse was Catholic"? It's an over-simplification, and he's referring to a Catholic problem rather than any aspect of authentic teaching, but here's one interpretation of the statement. The chief villains of the report are (mostly long dead) brothers who took vows but were not allowed to feel any vocation to the priesthood. Like many Irish priests, they were pushed by their families into celibacy, but enforced celibacy was not an aspect of Holy Orders. A sexually unstable brother was not restrained by a high religious calling, because in the eyes of society he had none. He was doubly trapped by the Church.

Of course, there were many priest abusers, too - and here we face the horrible paradox that the high religious calling, the unique prestige of the priesthood, enabled unscrupulous priests to abuse mostly teenage boys. But here my colleague's Irish violence/Catholic sex abuse theory does begin to break down, because clergy from Irish backgrounds are over-represented among priest abusers throughout the English-speaking world.

Last night I had supper with a distinguished American priest-scholar and made this point rather nervously. To my surprise, he agreed immediately. He said that the Irish didn't leave their legacy of domestic violence and alcohol behind them when they arrived in America; the phenomenon of the weak, drunken father persisted, and this reinforced the towering status of the priest in the Irish diaspora, enabling a minority of clergy - and it was never more than a small minority - to abuse spiritual power for sexual ends.

He added: "There's a particularly Irish Catholic culture of secrecy, too, partly rooted in a history of persecution, but also not unrelated to the corruption and back-room deals of Irish political life. That culture enabled abuse to happen, and to keep happening."

What a mess. I can't say that the consequences for the institutional Church are a high priority for me, or for any Catholic who has read this horrifying report. One of my friends is an Irish lady in her 60s whose life has been profoundly scarred by various forms of addiction - and no wonder: at the age of eight she was put into an "orphanage" where she was known by a number. She might as well have been in a concentration camp.

On the other hand, I was educated by Irish brothers (not Christian Brothers), most of them lovely men. Some of their predecessors may have been violent and ignorant, but not one of the brothers who taught me fitted that description. Their order once ran some brutal institutions in Ireland, and it will take courage for my old teachers to face up to the inevitable besmirching of their reputation and the wiping out - in the eyes of the public - of so much of their own good work. Which is precisely what Archbishop Vincent Nichols said last week.

But his main point was that the interests of the victims come first. Absolutely - and if, in the process of restitution, the Church is taken for a ride by a few con-artists, that's just too bad. For most graduates of these prison camps, this scandal has come to light far too late.

 
 

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