—– Ireland Archbishop Admits Child Abuse Report “Will Shock Us All” (Henry McDonald/The Guardian; April 10)

One of Ireland’s most senior clergyman admitted yesterday that an imminent report on the sexual abuse of children by clergy will shock the country and reveal that thousands of children were abused by priests.

In an unprecedented homily for Holy Thursday, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, warned that the depth of the abuse “will shock us all”.

The report from the commission on child sexual abuse will be published in May, and according to Martin it will throw up challenges to the Catholic church in Ireland it has never experienced before.

At a mass in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, Martin said: “It is likely that thousands of children or young people across Ireland were abused by priests in the period under investigation and the horror of that abuse was not recognised for what it is. The report will make each of us and the entire church in Dublin a humbler church.”…

[You know - just the way that a report detailing all the crimes of organized crime might make for a humbler Mafia.]

“We have no time to waste,” Martin said yesterday. “There is a dramatic and growing rift between the church and our younger generations, and the blame does not lie principally with young people. Our young people are generous and idealistic but such generosity and idealism does not seem to find a home in the church.”

He also illuminated the recruitment crisis in Irish Catholicism, in a country that once used to export its priests and nuns all over the world. “In the (Dublin) diocese there are 10 times more priests over 70 than under 40. In just a few years we will only have a little over 200 diocesan priests to minister to our almost 200 parishes.”…

Yes, there’s no time to waste – said the tardy fireman several decades after the smoke alarms were all disconnected by his peers and the fire began burning hundreds of lives to the ground.

And the blame for the growing rift between the child-abusing church and young people does not lie “principally” with the young people? What a generous admission!

And few people now want to follow in the soiled footprints of the Catholic clergy and become priests or nuns themselves? Awwwww…. please excuse me while I cry me a river of crocodile tears.

There are those who are hailing Martin’s words as forthright and refreshing. I personally find them a classic example of too little and too late.

An institution that has done this much harm doesn’t deserve to continue to exist. The question isn’t how it can be reformed and saved but how quickly it can be liquidated by a moral bankruptcy court before it can do any more damage.