This was completely predictable, of course. A Senior Vatican figure, Spanish Cardinal Antonio Canizares, prefect for the Congregation of the Divine Worship, this week appeared to downplay the findings of the Ryan report when suggesting that the millions of lives lost through abortion represent a much more serious crime against humanity than clerical sex abuse.
Rosaries, hmmm. Who knew the Vatican Taliban was concerned with the loss of enslaved child-labour in Ireland? It's no wonder then that Blob Blogging Wingnut is so ecstatic about the growing encroachment of Catholicism in China. If "sinful" women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, then it would certainly be financially salutory for such children born "in sin" to labour in rosaries-manufacturing sweat-shops run by the Catholic Church - covertly of course.Christine Buckley, barely a month old was found guilty of being the child of an unwed mother. For decades, such “sins” were sufficient to land children — and more than 30,000 others — in workhouse-style schools for girls and boys run by the
Roman Catholic Church.At such schools, according to a long-awaited report Wednesday, children were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for more than half a century.
A “culture of silence” protected victimizers rather than the children in their care — consigning generations of Ireland’s poorest children to misery, Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse has concluded. ...
These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s to the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.
The panel found that sexual molestation was “endemic,” committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities. ...The five-volume report is a major blow for a religious institution that continues to wield significant influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t tough enough for some of the victims who lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. Many are angry that the report includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for — and won — in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report’s findings.
“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Buckley, now 62.
She spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where she said children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.
7 comments:
I seem to recall you are a fan of Sherri S. Tepper. Do you remember a passage - I think its from Raising the Stones, although I could be wrong - where the hero raises his head in church to look closely at the statuary for the first time and realizes with a shock that the faithful have all this time been worshipping a series of predatory birds?
Alison, yes I've read Sherri Tepper but not that particular novel. So I looked up her bibliography here, and guess what? Tepper also wrote a series of very interesting educational pamphlets for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood when she worked for them, back in the 1970s.
Great post.
I hate how attached to this organization my mother is. She's made my sister and I promise to have a rosary said at her funeral. Now all I can think of is abused children when I see those beads.
I've often wondered what motivates the vehemently anti-abortion crowd. Along with some serious control issues, it seems to be to ensure a steady supply of victims to abuse and subject to a lifetime of misery.
Well I've been waiting all day for my co-blogger fern hill to wander by and leave a trenchant comment, so I may have to do for her, by linking to a blogpost she wrote a while back - Of rosaries and ovaries.
You rang?
I dunno about trenchant. I just can't get my head around people who would sentence a child to a work house for the crime of being a bastard.
Let alone the torture and rape and the bizarre justifications.
Some days, I dunno 'bout nuthin'.
One must accept the infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church and its rigidly narrow system of dictating life and the way it is to be lived by the population of "believers" in order to be able to get your head around the treatment of some children.
1. The mother, unmarried and having had sex is a fornicator, thus has committed a sin. There is forgiveness - but it is costly and brutal. Don't pay the price? Then remain a sinner, ostracized by the community on orders from the pulpit;
2. The child is a bastard, the product of a sin committed by sinners. The child carries the guilt of the parents since it was born outside the Roman Catholic sacrament of matrimony.
All of this is done in the name of a mystical supreme being no one has ever seen or heard outside a dream or hallucination, executing canon laws which were written by men, long after the unconfirmed existence of one Yehoshua, origins of whom remain unresolved to this day.
Catholic priests employ, as a "reason" for any actions they take with sinners, another sacrament, "penance and reconciliation", which they are administering and supervising as a right provided by the sacrament of "holy orders".
Conveniently, Roman Catholic priests are bound by an inviolable "seal of confession" which protects them from investigation by church authorities. In directing the reconciliation of a sinner, (remember the fornicating unwed mother), the priest not only doesn't have to reveal his actions, he's not allowed to.
It's all very tidy and, if it wasn't something that called itself a "church", it would be hauled into court for violating racketeering laws.
I'm certain someone will be by to attempt to re-educate me, which will force me to plaster them with embarrassing personal questions which they will not answer, further illuminating the unbelievable hypocrisy of something that is no more than a cult.
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