The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has disclosed the ugly face of hypocrisy and bigotry of the Roman Catholic Church. For the children who were raped, beaten, and treated like animals, or what the Second Vatican Council refer to as ‘People of God’, the revelations in the report is yet another example of acute abuse by a religious order.
It is behind the facade of good, behind the robes, the crosses, and the walls at the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers that the Roman Catholic Church and the Republic of Ireland allowed these atrocities to transpire. Of the 30,000 children sent to these predators, nearly half were abused.
The National Catholic Reporter calls the systemic abuse a world created by the Roman Catholic Church. I cannot agree more. The appalling conditions in which children, some as young as 2, were introduced was created by those who had vowed their lives to God, then turned on the innocent and robbed them of it.
Two dozen reports in the past 20 years have addressed the sexual exploitation by the Catholic clergy. And while the 2,600 word document details the experiences of its victims, the rapists in robes will never see the court room.
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.”
Their impunity is a tragic flaw in a society that allows its children to be exploited by an order whose Pope is supposed to be infallible, by an order that has time and time again transited pedophile priests from one church to another, by an order that today refuses to hand over these criminals. But this not surprising. So far, the Vatican has remained silent.
The Catholic authorities have known about this for years and at no time have offered any credible apology. The Christian Brotherhood tried to apologize in front of the TV cameras, but these were the same individuals who sued the Commission in 2004 to keep the identities of its members from being published.
The entire hierarchy is responsible, indirectly or not, for allowing the abuse to occur over the span of several generations. Anger is swelling as the Church now refuses to compensate a greater share to the victims. Any victim who accepts compensation has to sign away his or her right to sue either the church or the state reports the Boston Globe. All in the name of God.