Worse than expected

The Irish child abuse report is out and — Oh, man! — it’s ugly. Really. Really. Ugly.

Thousands beaten, raped in Irish reform schools

A fiercely debated, nine-year investigation into Ireland’s Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades — and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

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The report found that molestation and rape were “endemic” in boys’ facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

“In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. … Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body,” the report said. “Personal and family denigration was widespread.”

The kids in these schools were all somehow troubled before they arrived, and it appears likely that the greatest number of them were worse when they left.

But notice something:

• “frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless”
• “Personal and family denigration was widespread.”

I wish there were some nice way to say it, but there isn’t: That’s what you get when people are such fools they take that Original Sin stuff seriously. This cesspool is where that teaching leads.

Wednesday’s five-volume report sides almost completely with the former students’ accounts. It concludes that church officials always shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

Well, that’s a big surprise.

But the commission said its fact-finding — which included unearthing decades-old church files, chiefly stored in the Vatican, on scores of unreported abuse cases from Ireland’s industrial schools — demonstrated that officials understood exactly what was at stake: their own reputations.

It cited numerous examples where school managers told police about child abusers who were not church officials — but never did this when one of their own had committed the crime.

How much depravity and injury has to be paraded before the gullible before they get over the idea that Holy Men are something special? There are exceptions to every generalization but, as a class, they are poorly educated and, too often, themselves severely damaged.