Huffington Post has a report on many decades of sexual and physical abuse of thousands of Irish children by priests and nuns in Catholic run reform schools.  ( I do not want to be accused of just picking on Protestants in Africa and their American supporters. )

According to Shawn Pogatchnik “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.”

It reminded me of a class I taught years ago at Notre Dame College in California.  Students read a paper I had written about the predilection of large organizations to lie, and why they did so.  I had a number of case histories, including reports of how the Church in Ireland and California had covered up abuse of children by priests.  Some of my students scoffed, claiming the reports simply had to be exaggerated.

They shut up when an Irish graduate student who was also taking the course told them that he had been one of the children abused.  And no, there was no exaggeration.

Back to the current report: Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded by saying “A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”

As usual, once exposed, the Church offered apologies and regrets.  But also as usual representatives of the Church had opposed doing a report and one of the orders responsible, the ‘Christian (sic) Brothers’ had sued and won in 2004 to keep names secret.

The Church’s regrets’ might ring more true if this had been an isolated example.  But it was not.  Canada has admitted to even worse atrocities against native children who had been forcibly taken from their homes and incarcerated in church run ‘schools’ where up to 69% died.   By comparison the sexual abuse and torture that took place there was minor.  Most such schools were Catholic, though Canada’s other major denominations were involved as well.  These crimes against children took place from the late 19th century until the 1970s.  As usual, last month the Pope expressed his ‘regrets’ over these atrocities as well.