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As you might recall, my last entry focused primarily on the so-called Ryan Report and the terrible revelations it contains about the way thousands of children were abused for decades in Ireland’s Catholic-run boarding schools.

In the end, two closely related questions remain and demand to be answered:

—– Why did this happen?

—– What can be done to prevent it from happening again?

Some people seem to believe that human nature is ultimately responsible and that all humans are equally untrustworthy and deserving of close scrutiny. But if “human nature” is responsible, why doesn’t every human abuse children all the time? And if “human nature” is responsible, what hope do we have of ever doing anything to prevent the abuse detailed in the Ryan Report from happening again? (Indeed, if “human nature” is responsible, why should we even want to reduce that abuse? If we’re all child abusers at heart, why aren’t we all united in a common conspiracy to teach and engage in the abuse of children every single day of our lives?)

As I’ve said before, it seems to me that we need to take an epidemiological approach to problems like this much as medical researchers do when confronted with illness and disease. Just as it’s the case that not every person gets cancer or salmonella or is killed by the flu, not everyone engages in child abuse or other nasty activities. Saying “Sam got lung cancer and died because humans are the sort of creatures who get cancer and die” is less than helpful when it comes to explaining why Sam got cancer and his twin sister Sara didn’t – and it’s utterly useless as we try to decide what we should do to reduce the incidence of lung cancer among other people in the future.

When I look at the Ryan Report from an epidemiological perspective, what I see isn’t a collection of random people in a random country engaging in random acts of rape and violence against randomly chosen victims. What I see instead is yet one more incredibly detailed study that reveals that devout Catholics in an extremely Christian country systematically abused thousands of children for decades while other Christians turned a blind eye. These aren’t the sorts of reports that I see coming from non-Christian countries like Japan, and they’re not the sorts of reports that I see coming from less religious areas of the world like Norway or Vermont. Maybe that’s merely a coincidence – or maybe the non-Christians in Japan and Norway and Vermont are just doing a much better job covering up their decades-long abuse of thousands of children – but after years and years of studying this issue, I have to say that in my mind, at least, the burden of proof is on those who claim that this problem is more or less universal rather than a problem that’s more likely to occur in Catholic churches and communities than in others.

Given that the evidence provided by the Ryan Report, a Philadelphia grand jury, and numerous other sources over the years establishes a clear pattern of abuse involving Catholics and the Catholic Church rather than humans in general, it seems to me that we should sharpen our questions. Instead of merely asking “How could this abuse happen?” and “How can it be prevented from happening again?” it seems that we might more effectively ask “How could this abuse happen within the context of the Catholic Church?” and “How does the Catholic Church need to change so that the likelihood of this sort of abuse occurring again in the future is reduced?”

Are these merely the questions of an atheist who harbors a special hatred of Christians in general and Catholics in particular?

Hardly. Since the Ryan Report was released last week, I’ve come across several prominent Catholics who seem to be asking them as well.

Here’s a brief sampling of who they are and what they have to say:

—– The Ryan Report: First Reactions (Fergus O’Donoghue, SJ [Society of Jesus - Jesuit]/Editor, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review; May 20)

The Ryan Report reflects only too accurately what a friend (who died a few years ago) told me about his experiences as a child: orphaned, happy in the care of nuns and, later, terrified in the care of brothers.

The Executive Summary of the Report is available in PDF format, via the BBC website. If the reading is too hard, look at the Conclusions (pages 19 to 26), which are devastating.

There’s a clear distinction made here between physical (beatings) and sexual abuse. There’s clarity about the psychological damage inflicted on children. There’s a ringing condemnation of the Department of Education, which abdicated all its responsibility for thousands of children.

Part of the background is the middle class mentality which infused Irish society and the Irish Church: the children in institutions had to be taught to know their place.

Why did so many Catholic institutions fail so appallingly? A hundred reasons can be suggested, but three come to mind: undue respect for authority (which was self-justifying and rarely self-critical); religious authoritarianism (government of communities by self-perpetuating cliques, who rarely saw the need for fresh thinking); and a rancid clericalism (product of a religious culture that increasingly turned in on itself).

Religious life in Ireland has wonderful aspects, but this one is shameful.

—– Irish Report On Sex Abuse: Sipe Dismisses Donohue’s Diagnosis (RichardSipe.com; May 21)

The Irish Report of sexual abuse in institutions meant to care for children is now public. It represents 9 years of investigation and interviews with more than a thousand victims and church reports found in church files. In 2,600 pages it catalogues physical, emotional, and sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests, brothers and, nuns over a 60-year period. The institutions involved were established and financially supported by the Irish government, but administered by Catholic religious dedicated to the service of others and the imitation of Jesus Christ. The contradiction is so obvious that no commentary is necessary.

William Donohue, the voice of the Catholic League, cites the reaction to the report as “Hysteria.” Donohue is a Bozo. I don’t know any other appellation that can adequately describe the uninformed, unintelligent, and frankly stupid reaction of a man who responds thus to the facts of abuse by supposedly responsible and trusted religious. Even Irish Cardinal Brady could admit that he was “profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed” and hoped that the publication of the report would help heal victims’ hurts, and “address the hurts of the past.” The Christian Brothers who have a longstanding reputation of delivering good education with a heavy rod resisted resolution by instituting lawsuits much like the operation of the U.S. church. The sisters of Mercy, better known for their charity, have been a bit more forthcoming in their repentance for the abuse.

Over, and over, and over again faithful and former Catholics give witness the fact of abuse by Catholic clergy and religious. Mostly that witness is given with pain and regret – and sometimes with disillusionment and even rage. Father Andrew Greeley estimated a decade ago that U.S. Catholic clergy had abused at least 120,000 minors. He was being modest and conservative. But he was on the right track. If some of the clergy have been taken out of commission by the Dallas accord the victims and survivors remain. The Church – and those who fail to understand the reality, causes, and consequences of clergy sex abuse – cannot expect trust or respect. Sarah Lyall spoke not only about Ireland when she wrote, “The revelations have also had the effect of stripping the Catholic Church…of much of its moral authority and political power.” (After all, 31 percent of American adults brought up Catholic have left the faith. Cf. Pew Forum, 08)

Apologies from the hierarchy continue to be offered as if the problem of sex abuse is “now behind them.” News Flash! The problem of sex by Catholic clergy and religious is very much alive and well within the clerical system. Sexual distortion – expressing itself in at least 6 percent of priests who abuse minors – is endemic to the clerical culture because its members are not sufficiently educated to know about sex and how to handle their sexuality. Most are not actually interested in understanding or practicing celibacy. The theories of sexuality they depend on are “intrinsically” inadequate and false. The system of authoritarian ecclesiastical control fosters and protects secret sexual expression – homosexuality and a double life. The power structure colludes to cover up the facts about clergy sexual activity. Sexual failings by bishops and priests are relegated to the confessional wastebasket where all is forgiven and forgotten rather than considered in an evaluation process where causes and effects – and the necessity of change – are honestly measured.

The problem is over? Is there anyone who thinks that Irish and American bishops and priests have lost their sexual drive – or their orientation, or their habits and relationships? In what ways has the clerical system of education or culture changed? In what ways have any of their operations vis-à-vis sexuality – birth control, masturbation, homosexuality, sex before marriage or after divorce/widowhood, optional celibacy for priests, ordination of women – changed?

As one reviews the list of clerics who support Donohue and the League – Egan, Mahony, Chaput, O’Brien, O’Malley and others – with encomiums for “the protection of the faith, the defense of victims, courage to speak up candidly, teaching the hard truths of the Gospel” – one is struck by the oppositional, obstructionistic, and arrogant way all of the clerical Donohue supporters still operate. Like Cosa Nostra?

Those like Donohue who minimize and distort the real picture of clergy abuse of sex and power continue to do a huge disservice to the Catholic Church. Every U.S. Grand Jury investigation into clergy sexual abuse of minors came to exactly the same conclusion: the church has colluded to cover up facts, protect offenders and preferred institutional image and the avoidance of scandal above the safety of children. Hundreds of thousands of Catholics know the truth even if many are too intimidated or tired to say so aloud. There is nothing hysterical—over emotional or attention seeking – in the Irish Report or in reactions to it. Only a Bozo would think so. Facts, even painful facts, are still facts – the truth remains solid even after attacks or dismissals from powerful coalitions. Truth silently prevails, Bozos don’t.

(NOTE: Sipe is a well-known psychotherapist and former priest who has spent over 25 years studying the men and issues at the heart of the Catholic sex abuse scandal. You can learn more about his point of view in the entry I posted on March 4.)

—– A Century Of Looking The Other Way (John Banville/The New York Times; May 22)

EVERYONE knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen?

Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew.

I grew up in the 1950s, in Wexford, a small town on the southeast coast of Ireland. It was not a bad place in which to be young, if you came from a “respectable” family – which mainly meant not being poor – and had parents who were responsible and loving, as I had. The schools I attended were run by the Christian Brothers and, later, by diocesan priests. It helped to be good at one’s lessons, for then one evaded the more severe punishments which teachers reserved for the “duffers” in the class.

I remember one such duffer in particular. I shall call him Duffy. We were, I suppose, 9 or 10 at the time, and most of us by then had learned to read and write. Not Duffy, who was isolated from the rest of us and put to sit at a desk by himself, where he labored hour after hour transcribing the alphabet and simple words into his copybook.

Now and then our teacher would lift up Duffy’s work by one corner and display it to the class, inviting us in a tone of amused irony to admire “Duffy’s blots.” I have never forgotten Duffy’s expression on these occasions, a mingling of shame, sorrow and inarticulate rage. Often on the way home from school Duffy would waylay me and punch me and knock me down. Why would he not? I was top of the class, he was bottom; I was teacher’s pet, he was teacher’s victim and plaything.

I did not tell my parents about Duffy, about the humiliations that were piled on him daily in class or how he regularly vented his anger on me afterward. In the same way, I did not tell them of the beatings we were all subjected to by some of our teachers, with leather strap, cane or even fists. One did not bring home tales out of school. If we had, they would probably not have been listened to. The times were harsh, money was scarce and had to be worked hard for, and our task as children was to bear up and keep our mouths shut.

In time there grew up between Duffy and me a kind of awful intimacy, a very pale version of that which is said frequently to develop between a torture victim and the torturer. I saw the logic of Duffy’s position: his daily torments at the hands of his teacher must be avenged somehow. W. H. Auden, that wise old owl, puts it perfectly, as so often:

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Well, not evil, not really. That was being done elsewhere, in places like the one that Duffy ended up in, Letterfrack Industrial School in Connemara, a far-off and isolated place where, according to the commission’s report, “those people who chose to abuse boys physically and sexually were able to do so for longer periods of time, because they could escape detection and punishment” and where violence “was practically a means of communication.”

One wants to believe that the abusers were those to whom evil had been done, which would go some way to accounting for their deeds. But then, one wants to believe, and disbelieve, all sorts of things, and so did our parents.

When I read the newspaper accounts of the commission’s findings — the report itself is more than 2,000 pages long — I found myself thinking again of Duffy, and the sweaty pact of silence that developed between us. It was an echo of that silence which, like the snow in Joyce’s story “The Dead,” was general all over Ireland, in those days. Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings – human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland – have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled – the word is not too strong – by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.

(NOTE: According to Wikipedia, “John Banville (born 1945) is an Irish novelist and journalist. His novel, The Book of Evidence (1989), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005″).

—– Tarnished Orders Have A Last Chance At Redemption (Archbishop Diarmuid Martin/The Irish Times; May 25)

WHERE DOES the church go from here? The church has failed people. The church has failed children. There is no denying that. This can only be regretted and it must be regretted. Yet “sorry” can be an easy word to say. When it has to be said so often, then “sorry” is no longer enough.

But “sorry” must always be the first word.

The Ryan report shocked me. But it did not totally surprise me. I was ordained 40 years ago today and at my ordination and that of a friend we had a group of former residents of industrial schools: people of our own age, great people and friends of ours.

As students we had worked in a hostel in Dublin for former residents of industrial schools, especially Artane. Later I worked in a centre in London for ex-prisoners, a large proportion of whom included generations of Irish industrial school residents. The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity.

Sadly, the Ryan report came so late.

Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.

A chaplain to Artane had put much of it writing. A few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney spoke out. When the first efforts were made to reform Artane, it was patently evident that the only change possible was to close it down.

Someone wrote to me this week about an entirely different matter and said: “there is always a price to pay for not responding”. The church will have to pay that price in terms of its credibility.

The first thing the church has to do is to move out of any mode of denial. That was the position for far too long and it is still there.

Yes, there was abuse in other quarters. Yes, childcare policy in Ireland at the time was totally inadequate. But the church presented itself as different to others and as better than others and as more moral than others. Its record should have shown that and it did not. Ryan reveals church institutions where children were placed in the care of people with practically no morals.

Where the church is involved in social care it should be in the vanguard. That is different to a situation in which the church proclaims that it is in the vanguard. In industrial schools the church, with good intentions, became involved in a Victorian model of childcare and became more Victorian than the Victorians, and when Victorianism was shown to be wrong, those responsible did not have the foresight to recognise that and children were exposed to pathological Victorianism.

There is a sense of shock among many good priests and religious at what has happened. But that sense of shock should not slip into a situation in which they feel themselves almost as the victims. No one in the church must ever try to water down or reformulate the suffering of survivors. Let the survivors speak and tell their stories as they experienced them.

What do I say to the religious orders who have been identified as being responsible for what happened? Let me speak to them directly: I think that you have to ask and truly try to answer the question which Ryan has put to you: “What happened that you drifted so far away from your own charism?”

I believe that you owe it to your good members to try to answer that question thoroughly, honestly and in a transparent way. Your credibility and the credibility and survival of your charism depend on the honesty with which you go about that soul searching. This may be a painful task, but it is unavoidable if it is to be possible for your charism to survive. People are angry and disillusioned.

What was lost was more than just a charism. Somehow along the way the most essential dimension of the life of the followers of Jesus Christ got lost by many. The Christian message is a message of love. What the Ryan commission recounts is sadly so very far removed from that. In Jesus’s eyes the poor deserve the best and they did not receive it here.

Even where you have recognised what was wrong, the Ryan report must have brought home to you the extent of what went wrong in a manner which perhaps you were not able to imagine in the past. The facts are now clear and you have to take notice and make some new gesture of recognition.

An agreement was made with government seven years ago. The fact that the mechanisms of fulfilling your side of that agreement have not yet been brought to completion is stunning. There may have been legal difficulties, but they are really a poor excuse after so many years.

Whatever happens with regards to renegotiating that agreement, you cannot just leave things as they are. There are many ways in which substantial financial investment in supporting survivors and their families can be brought about, perhaps in creative ways which would once again redeem your own charism as educators of the poor. In many ways it is your last chance to render honour to charismatic founders and to so many good members of your congregations who feel tarnished.

Sadly, in a very short time another report on the sexual abuse of children will be published, this time about how such abuse was managed in the Archdiocese of Dublin of which I am archbishop. It will not be easy reading. The steps that have been taken to put in place good child safeguarding norms will never wipe away the sufferings of those who were abused. Let the truth, however, come out.

(NOTE: According to a story in today’s (London) Times, “The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland has clashed with the religious orders involved in child abuse over the amount they are willing to contribute towards compensating victims. Eighteen Catholic congregations defied calls from Cardinal Sean Brady to be more generous in their dealings with those who suffered abuse.”)

It seems to me that these four essays offer a variety of explanations for why the abuse of children in Ireland’s Catholic boarding schools occurred and what ought to be done to prevent it from occurring again.

What reasons and suggestions can you identify?

Which reasons and suggestions do you think are the best?

Can you think of any others that might be better?