Accountability

Thousands of children suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse over several decades in some 200 residential institutions run by religious congregations, a long-awaited report by the Irish government states.

The devastating report published yesterday describes how children lived in “a climate of fear” in the institutions and finds that “sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions”. Cases of sexual abuse were hidden by the congregations that ran the institutions and offenders were transferred to other locations where they were free to abuse again, the report says.

The 2,600-page report, covering a 60-year-period from 1936 to the present, represents a scathing critique of Catholic church-operated schools and reformatories, raising serious questions about Catholic institutions that permitted and fostered climates of sustained abuse by priests and nuns.

Most of the sites investigated had closed by the late 1980s.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Ireland, used a Holy Thursday sermon to brace the country’s Catholics for what he said would be a shocking report on the extent of clergy sexual abuse in the archdiocese during a 30-year period beginning in 1975.

The results of a three-year investigation are expected to be released as soon as next month, according to Irish press reports.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said that the imminent report will show that thousands of children were sexually abused by Catholic priests, including many serial offenders. The report, he said, “will shock us all” and “will make each of us and the entire church in Dublin a humbler church,” according to reports in the Irish Independent and the Irish Times newspapers.

The extensive investigation of parishes in the Irish capital was conducted by the government and follows a similar investigation into abuse in the Diocese of Ferns. The Ferns Report, released in 2005, rocked the country with revelations that between 21 and 28 priests raped and sodomized young boys and girls in the diocese over a 40-year period.

As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.

Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.