Well, uh…uh…nevermind. Forget it. 
What … 30 years of systematic abuse against damn near every Catholic in Ireland’s schools isn’t enough for you? It’s got to be 100% or you’re going to cry “witch hunt?”
God has 2,000 years of audits to cach up on. His staff is simply overwhelmed. I blame Metatron, as his handwriting is unintelligible even to the omniscient.
It wouldn’t be a “witch hunt” if the church would live up to their own principles.
And where is the outcry from rank and file Catholics about the pedophile enablers that fill the ranks of the Catholic hierarchy. How anyone can still proudly say they are Catholic astounds me.
It wouldn’t be a “witch hunt” if the church would live up to their own principles.
(At least I was lucky when I was in Catholic school – we had Archbishop Wuerl (well, back then he was just plain ol’ Bishop), who has a strict “zero tolerance” policy. The wiki entry doesn’t mention it, but at one point, he went all the way to the Vatican to argue when he refused to reinstate a priest accused of molestation.)
damned double post!!!
How has there been 30 years of systematic abuse against damn near EVERY Catholic?
While I don’t give a damn what Catholics do or don’t do, this bit of news only highlights the HUGE hypocrisy that tints that particular denomination. I mean, even I, as an atheist, had to hear about the infamous Padre Alberto and the “scandal” he created by wanting to get married – it’s almost 24/7 around here with that shit.
And now this. Surely they’ll attempt to re-bury it ASAP. Money, of course, under the circumstances, clearly not an object.
For shame!
That’s not what I said, dumbshit.
Yes it is.
No.
A little beside the point here, but I would love to see that tested empirically. 
That sounded like the opus dei cardinal out of the Da Vinci code.
Declan
School from 1959 - 1967.
So true - the British equivalent is the people who won’t consider anything other than a C of E wedding, despite never going there at any other time.
And that is how all cases should be handled. Bust them, call the cops, press charges.
This is a problem. I think that anyone who knows, and refuses to divulge the information to the police, should be charged as an accessory.
As a product of 20 years of American public education, kindergarten through university, and not Irish my take on this may be somewhat muddled, but from the establishment of the republic through the mid 1990s the public and mandatory education system, primary and secondary, was in the hands of a special order of teaching priests, the Christian Brothers, who appear to have been responsible only to their particular bishop. While there surely were some up to date progressive teachers in the outfit their approach to childhood education seems to have been pretty Dickensesque, corporal punishment for any default no matter how minor and pretty vicious corporal punishment.
Some Irishman who is on one of the HBO soap operas was on the radio recently and talked about his education at the hands of the Christian Brothers – including one who because of a brain injury wrote on the chalk board upside down and backwards and required his students to do the same. His sanction for writing right way up and from left to right was “twelve of the best.” He also said that there was considerable pressure and manipulation to induce pre-pubescent young men to commit to the priesthood and ship off to a seminary.
Everything I have read and heard says that the Irish teaching priests, as a class, were notoriously brutal but that there was no remedy or relief save putting your kids in a private, meaning Protestant parochial, school. That was not a realistic option for most people because of the cost and the RCC’s control of the community. There was no way to escape being slapped around by the Christian Brothers.
In terms of how could every Irishman have been brutalized by the Church – the answer is that everyone was brutalized by virtue of having gone through the public schools. All of my information is that the Christian Brothers made Sister Angelina with her brass bound ruler look like the Tooth Fairy. That the Irish government and Church have done and released the report speaks well of them, that it took this long to do it does not.
I absolutely agree. The parallels between abuse by priests & abuse by coaches are pretty limited; it only shows that priests do not have a monopoly on abuse of those in their care.
While I was Catholic as a child I, and as far as I know, no one else in my church or diocese were abused. However, the church was more than willing to put me and the community in danger so they could turn down the heat in another location.
Damn near every Catholic was abused by institutional corruption. Any Catholic who gave their money to the church for “good works” and to line the pockets of the Pope, instead had it used to protect these monsters and fight any attempt to hold these people accountable.
I realize this specific case is in Ireland, but this problem is attached to the church everywhere it sticks its greedy, vile hands.