The RCC is caught yet again trying to protect itself at the expense of abused children.

Ireland has been dealing with this kind of stuff for years and nothing would be unsurprising if it turned out to be true. If the church was to ordinate women it would bring some kind of balance to the church, instead it just wants to flush out women and wrongfully embrace/rape little children. A patriarchal church is an unhealthy and abnormal one.
I grew up in Goldenbridge industrial school in Dublin, Ireland, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy. The cruelty meted out to little children on a daily basis by the religious was nothing short of sadistic. I wrote an article called The Goldenbridge Secret Rosary Bead Factory in the aftermath of a commission to inquire into institutional child abuse, as I was absolutely infuriated at the denial mode of the religious at the CICA. (A Goldenbridge survivor called Christine Buckley who grew up with me, was the chief instigator behind the government’s setting up of the Irish Commission to Inquire into Institutional Child Abuse.) The religious were found wanting in the subsequent Ryan Report that landed on the pope’s desk. Murphy Report and Ferns Report were a fall-out of the Ryan Report. The former two deal specifically with clerical non-institutional child sex abuse.

Sexual abuse was only part of what systematically happened to little boys in Artane, Letterfrack, and Daingean industrial schools, to name but a few religious-run institutions. They had no means of physical escape, unlike children of this sad article who derived from parishes. Institutionalised children of the past had to give in to their abusers and even befriend them in order to survive. Besides, some children who were institutionalised from early childhood could not differentiate and considered what their abusers did to them as normal behaviour. They did not have parents to protect or guide them or run home to after their abuse. They were 24/7 locked behind child prison gulags.

The twenty one priests who have been suspended by the archdiocese of Philadelphia after they were named as child molestation suspects in a grand jury report last month sends shivers down my spine. What a phenomenal amount of holy men to be under the scrutiny of the law.

A Lament and Repentance service recently took place in Dublin’s Pro-cathedral for the sexual and institutional abuse of the children in the past. Some survivors saw it only as a PR stunt. The perpetrators of the religious run institutions were never prosecuted for their crimes as they were covered by CICA. So with this in mind justice is seeing to be done in the Philadelphia cases.

“A former high-ranking Catholic Church official has been accused of transferring priests to new parishes without warning people of the sexual abuse allegations made against those priests.” Think Brendan Smyth. Think Tony Walshe! Typical behaviour of the church. The church used to think that relationships with women was less of a crime than that of appropriate behaviour with children.

Oops! I should have said ‘inappropriate’ behaviour of children.

Cardinal Sean O’ Malley from Boston, I should add, was one of the visiting prelates, appointed by the pope to go to Ireland to sort out the child sex abuse debacle and to relay it back to the Vatican The ‘washing of feet’ ceremony that took place in the Pro-Cathedral (of which he was one of the washers) was kept a guarded secret for 18 months and was never even discussed with ordinary survivors of abuse. They only found out about it at the last moment. What a sham. The church is very shrewd and pays only lip service to the survivors. So hypocritical!

Sorry – i don’t mean to hijack the Philadelphia abuse cases. My heart goes out to the recipients of the abuse by the so-called trusted church members.

There is soooo much of this going on, I’m beginning to wonder is it all true, it’s everywhere. Don’t all start ‘shouting’ at me, I just think could this really be so widespread.