I don’t think the “don’t call the cops” response was solely a matter of the church’s self-image. Decades ago, many people felt that sexual abuse (of any kind, by anybody) was something to be concealed—for the victim’s sake—rather than reported.
I’m sure that’s true in some cases.
But in the church scandal, there were thousands of cases where people DID go ahead and make reports, to the police or the church or both. The powers that be chose to ignore them or cover up the crimes.
I don’t know much (if anything) about Ireland, but in other times and other places, when people no longer felt they could get justice from the law, the government, or the nobles, they would take the matter in their own hands. Isn’t that how we got such charming notions as vendetta, blood feud, vigilantism, etc? I’m not advocating that, but in other places that seemed to occur just enough to be interesting.
The class aspect of this shameful affair really needs to be appreciated. The priests in your ordinary “national” school were bad enough but the industrial schools were a whole different order of badness. Many of these children were sent there for no reason other than the poverty of their parents. The abuse they suffered may have been accepted as a normal part of society but it has to be questioned whether that would be the case if it wasn’t for the low social status of the victims.
The Magdalene victims have been particularly screwed over by the State. Most of them have not been able to obtain compensation because they are deemed to have been in these institutions voluntarily - even though those who escaped were captured and brought back by the police.
To quite a large degree in fact, it still runs over 90% of the primary schools here.
In poor countries, the church always has the whip hand. Always.
While the whole world is now in recession, Ireland is still a first world country. But it has only been a first world country for a pretty short amount of time. Until the tail end of the 1980s, Ireland was flat stoney broke and in dire financial straits. That’s when the economic growth started and there was massive foreign investment in manufacturing and all the rest of it that went with the economic boom.
But, seeing as how the Catholic church had held such a position of power and influence over the law makers and the government and the judiciary and the police in the formative years of the State, you’d be hard pressed at that time to find an average Joe Bloggs Irish person who thought that the priests and nuns and church in general were ever anything other than above reproach. That was the mindset of the ordinary person. And the mindset of the people who were in power, because that’s the way everyone had been raised. Not questions. Go to Mass and Confession and do as you’re told. People who are not Irish, or maybe who are Irish but who are younger than me might find that a bit hard to credit.
Here’s a story which might illustrate the point. Social commentators these days more or less acknowledge that this incident marked the start of a new time in Irish life, a time when people began to twig that the church could be looked at with a critical eye. They say that now. But at the time, it was a different story.
When I was a teenager in the early 80s there was national outrage - a complete and utter scandal - concerning a woman called Annie Murphy. She was an American woman who had a teenage son. She went on the most watched Irish television programme of the day, The Late Late show to tell her story. Her father’s son was Eamon Casey and he was by that time the Bishop of Galway. He had paid her maintenance for his son out of parish funds. There was a scandal. Uproar in the papers and on the radio and it was all anyone talked about for weeks.
The reason it was a scandal was not that Eamon Casey had carried on a sexual relationship with a woman. Nor that he had misappropriated church funds for years and years and years. No, the outrage was that this American hussy was a shameless American harlot who’d brazenly seduced a holy Irish man and had the monumental American cheek to parade her American brazenness and advanced American harlotry on Irish television. Had she no shame? Why did she not just go back to America, where she belonged?
(It seemed to be tremendously important that she was an American, as I recall)
That’s what people in Ireland were like in the early eighties. The church and the people in its ministry were beyond reproach. It’s no surprise to me that it’s only now we’re having half way proper inquiries into the church. Nothing in the way of proper justice, though. But perhaps that mindset needs another thirty years to come to fruition. When all the guilty parties are well and truly dead.
That Annie Murphy episode was a hatchet job on that woman. It was in '91 though not the 80’s.
Heh- I have a friend whose son shares first & last name with the good bishop- the story broke when the kid was about 4 months old, but they decided not to change his name since they live in America now and very few people would connect the names. Coincidence but a yucky one. 
It was a complete hatchet job, you’re right. I suppose that’s why it was some sort of a turning point in the minds of Irish people. Since Annie Murphy, when some new bad thing comes out about priests’ and nuns’ behaviour the person saying them is believed, not treated with derision.
Thanks for the correction on the date.
Nowadays we’d be thankful that he had consensual sex with an adult.
How things change over time.
Nitpick: Altar boys (and in the last generation, in America at least, altar girls) serve Mass. Priests celebrate the Mass.
I find it difficult to comprehend the stories of Dopers having had their left-handedness disciplined out of them by the nuns. I heard about it from my mother, who reported that she witnessed it, of course, but I went to Catholic schools from 1961-1974, and it was never tried on me or any of my fellow sinister classmates. It’s incredible to me that it still went on post-1960.
I’m no longer a Catholic, but it really has more to do with the fact that of these 12
I only believe #4. And my belief in that is that it might have actually happened.
My cousin, who is 40 this year and from Northern Ireland said that the teacher in her primary school asked her parents if they wanted her to write righthanded rather than her natural lefthanded way. This would have been in and around 1974 or '75.
Yah, I guess I should have specified incredulity that it was still going on in America.
Well, I’m left handed and went to 8 years of catholic gradeschool from 1964-72, in the Chicago diocese. While I did get slapped around some, it wasn’t due to trying to force me to be right-handed. They never messed with that – though they tried tying my older sister’s left arm for a while. She is 3 years older. I don’t really know whether they didn’t bother with me because it didn’t work with my sister.
It didn’t happen in my schools, but I did hear stories from old people (old being relative here, as kids think every adult is pretty old). I guess by my time, people just knew better.
My husband was forced to use his right hand for writing. The end result was him using his right hand but having the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen. He could never manage to relearn using his left, though. He was born in 1960 and went to public school in Louisville.
I’d wondered for a while whether I was forced to use my right hand for writing, and my father recently confirmed that my first grade teacher did so. He still thinks it was a good idea, as he believes, quite seriously, that left-handedness is a opening to demon possession. :rolleyes: My handwriting is also abysmal.
I was born in '69.
I was born in '56, and was permitted (in a Catholic school, yet!) to let my inner sinister demon possess me.
And I have terrible handwriting. And I could never get a fountain pen to make a mark on a piece of paper. So I always used ball-points. Later I learned about left-handed nibs.
A friend who was born in 1967 had to get her parents permission to write left-handed in grammar school. :rolleyes: That would have been about 1973.
Abusing children is all well and good - it toughens them up - but abusing left-handers? That’s beyond the pale!
Born '69, lefty, never had a problem or was forced to conform, though I heard stories of a great-uncle who was.
It happened within the pale as well 