The abuse of children

A very high-powered commission in Ireland has produced a massive report on the abuse of children in Catholic institutions in the mid-20th century. It's monstrous. On the web, the .pdf files are huge. And sickening. Needy and helpless children knew nothing other than sustained torture, beatings and floggings, sexual assault, injustice and exploitation, fear and suffering, through their childhood and adolescent years -- at the hands of professing and vowed christian servants in orders such as the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy...(Mercy...heaven help us all...)

And that's just Ireland. This is not ancient history. The recipients of this christian service, many of them, are with us today. Many of them remain crippled and consumed with anger.

This is the shadow side of catholicism -- of importance to me, because I am a Benedictine Oblate, and therefore somehow committed to catholicism. I have always known that, wherever you are in the christian outfit you have to take the rough with the smooth, the ugly and the botoxed with the beautiful, the sinners with the saints. You have to buy the whole rotten field because it is there that the treasure is buried...

But this is unthinkable. To over-work a verb, I think Jesus also thought this.. Whoever harms one of these little ones, it were better for that person that a millstone were hung round his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea. (Anyway, see Matthew 18:6, and Luke 17:2).

Someone on radio this morning pointed out that, at that time, plenty of people entered these religious orders, not because they wanted to, or had any sort of christian calling, but because of family pressure, social deprivation, total lack of prospects. These people became professed Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy -- to say nothing of other orders. The children referred to these institutions encountered teachers, supervisors, whatever, who had actually no vocation, no hope, whatever. Ye gods.

And I want to write something, perhaps another day, about apology and apologies, and how the whole currency of real contrition has got devalued... Another day.

But meanwhile, the children. Children have an absolute moral claim on adult care. It's not negotiable. The Irish children, and others around the world, are an ineradicable blot on the conscience of a great many christians, most of whom had nothing to do with it personally.