ChiefsPlanet - Life 'Forgive Me, Father. For I Have Sinned'

Child-abuse horror stretched over generations

DUBLIN, Ireland | Tom Sweeney, an 11-year-old, kept skipping school.

Mannix Flynn got caught stealing a box of chocolates when he was 8.

And Christine Buckley, barely a month old, was found guilty of being the child of an unwed mother.

For decades, such “sins” were sufficient to land all three children — and more than 30,000 others — in workhouse-style schools for girls and boys run by the Roman Catholic Church.

At such schools, according to a long-awaited report Wednesday, children were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for more than half a century.

A “culture of silence” protected victimizers rather than the children in their care — consigning generations of Ireland’s poorest children to misery, Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse has concluded.

Through it all, the report said, government inspectors failed to stop what was going on. That neglect came despite attempts by some individuals to bring their abusers to account in an effort to lessen the trauma that victims suffered for years afterward — and that still haunts many today.

Chronic, excessive and arbitrary punishment created “a climate of fear” in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived “with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”

These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s to the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.
The panel found that sexual molestation was “endemic,” committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities.

Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics, offered an apology Wednesday for the abuses found by the commission.

“I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions,” Brady said, according to The Associated Press. “Children deserve better and especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ.”

The five-volume report is a major blow for a religious institution that continues to wield significant influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t tough enough for some of the victims who lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. Many are angry that the report includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for — and won — in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report’s findings.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Buckley, now 62.

She spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where she said children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not. She didn’t track down her parents, an Irish mother and Nigerian father, until her 40s, when she became one of the first to break silence and demand justice for her stolen youth.

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