The Shame of Church and State in Eire
A Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), charged with investigating complaints regarding physical, emotional and sexual abuse in residential schools and orphanages in the Irish State between 1936 and the present time, but mostly between 1936 and the 1970s, was established in 2000. It was in the 1990s that the abuse perpetrated in these institutions became a matter of more general public knowledge. Many of the Industrial and Reformatory schools were under the supervision of Roman Catholic Orders, most prominently the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy.
The Commission’s 2500 page Report was published as recently as May 2009 by Mr Justice Sean Ryan, the delay largely contributed to by the lengthy but successful legal battle of the Christian Brothers to ensure that the names of the perpetrators of physical, mental and moral abuse should not be revealed in the Report. (In 2002 the Roman Catholic Church agreed with the Irish State to make at least the equivalent of £113 million available for victims of abuse in return for immunity from lawsuits.) The Commission investigated all institutions concerning which there were more than 20 complaints. Due to a move away from institution-based care many of these places were closed by the 1990s but the Commission’s Confidential Committee heard evidence from 1090 surviving men and women who claimed to be victims of abuse. Such documentation as was available was examined and religious orders and legal representatives were consulted.
According to the official summary of this Report (which we read when invited to comment on this matter) many of these children, particularly boys, lived in a harsh climate of oppression and fear. They suffered not only from neglect and “a lack of attachment and affection” but from dread of disproportionate, undeserved or severe physical punishment and especially of repeated abuse. While the actual abuse could in some cases be attributed to a few individuals within these institutions, the Commission found that, in addition to practising a severe regime, the authorities within the religious orders and institutions did not deal properly with complaints and generally, “to avoid scandal and publicity, protected the perpetrators of abuse”.
Violent and abusive “Christian Brothers” were moved between institutions
rather than dismissed and were protected by diocesan and school authorities. Complaints made by children or their relatives to school authorities, the Department of Education, Health Boards, parish priests and others were generally ignored, the children often punished and relatives persuaded to be silent or withdraw complaints. Inspections by the Department of Education were too few and limited in scope. There was tacit acknowledgment by the state of the “ascendancy” of the religious orders and “their ownership of the system” which resulted in it defending the religious orders and the schools when complaints were made. The fact that such abuse was a criminal offence was ignored. “There was no attempt to address the underlying systemic nature of the problem.” It was made very difficult for members of staff who wished to provide care and affection to children. One commentator concludes that the CICA Report reveals “an entire system that was rotten at the core” rather than merely the existence of bad individuals.
Cardinal Sean Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, together with other Irish clerics, have made public apologies and spoken of their distress. The Cardinal and Archbishop have discussed the matter with Pope Benedict, who as Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001 endorsed the Vatican view that such matters “be pursued in a most secretive way”, the main consideration then and now being defending the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church. The religious orders still justify the policy of protecting the identities of the abusers whose crimes they profess to detest, even though they may concede that the compensation offered may be increased and more help given to surviving victims. The new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, whose recent installation was attended by official representatives of the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, praised the courage of those priests who acknowledged that abuse had taken place.
Scandals in Roman Catholic institutions are not new in Ireland, nor confined to Ireland, as reports from around the world during the past decade demonstrate. Undoubtedly and sadly there have been scandalous cases within Protestant churches and there have been serious failures to deal with some of them in a biblical way. But the religion of the Bible, believed and practised, inevitably promotes holiness and chastity and love and creates an environment in which the works of the flesh are aberrations to be abhorred. We recognise that many Roman Catholics, and many who have no religion, detest the deeds uncovered in the CICA Report. But the religion of Rome inevitably provides fertile ground for the growth of all the evil fruits of our corrupt nature in those whose new birth is nothing more than their baptism and whose faith is nothing other than resting on the rites of the Church for salvation. Particularly, as Loraine Boettner points out in Roman Catholicism, forced celibacy and
auricular confession are by their very nature conducive to such perversions as the CICA Report documents. Boettner draws attention to Bernard of Clairvaux’s twelfth-century protest against forcing celibacy on the Church’s ministers: “Deprive the Church of honourable marriage, and you fill her with concubinage, incest, and all manner of nameless vice and uncleanness”.
No doubt, some in their outward lives are worse and some are better than the creeds they profess, but throughout the centuries and around the world, judged by the fact that “ye shall know them by their fruits” (see Matt 7:15ff), Romanism as a system has thrown light upon what Paul meant by “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess 2:7). HMC