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Rigid Catholic Church still has our children in its clutches

Added on May 21, 2006

Sunday May 21st 2006


SISTER Helena O'Donoghue, the leader of the Sisters of Mercy, south central province, gave evidence, on Monday last, to the public hearings of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. She told the commission that she had great difficulty with the way St Vincent's Industrial School at Goldenbridge in Dublin had been "vilified".

She did, however, repeat the mantra that the order apologised to those who "may have been hurt". Note the "may". Will those Roman Catholics who have heard the agonised testimony of people who remember their ghastly childhoods as "pupils" in that industrial School (a polite word for a reformatory where children were used as cheap labour instead of being educated) accept her testimony, (of which more later)?

Will they accept her apology, mealy-mouthed as all apologies have been from the officials of the Roman Catholic Church, forced from them only when they have been dragged kicking and screaming into public scrutiny?

It has now emerged that the Health Service Executive in the west has recently been investigating alleged sexual assaults on pupils by at least one nun at Kylemore Abbey Boarding School. The alleged abuse, according to sources, dates back about 20 years. There was a church investigation at that time, and results are believed to have been forwarded to the Vatican. But there have been no criminal charges. And neither the gardai nor the Western Health Board were informed at the time. That was in the Eighties, 30 years after Goldenbridge was at its fermenting height.

The documentary, The Rocky Road to Dublin, was shown on RTE television on Tuesday night. Dating from 1968, nearly 20 years before the alleged incidents of molestation at Kylemore Abbey, it showed small children mouthing their catechisms concerning the sins of impurity, and "debating" possible "occasions of sin".

It showed their older brothers and sisters dancing, always tentatively, never smiling. And it talked to the leaders of our bleak society, all of whom, with the possible exception of Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, the only intellectual interviewed, displayed closed, canting minds.

The only hope for Ireland was to barricade ourselves against progress, culture, and intellectualism. The only people who smiled in the documentary were Roman Catholic bishops and priests.

And perhaps most horribly of all, the documentary purported to show us a new, healthier Ireland, in the figure of the undignified hypocrite Father Michael Cleary, the man who was to father two sons with his emotionally fragile housekeeper. He was preaching at a wedding party about the importance of the young couple not succumbing to lust. Hope for the future lay in acting the fool, being patronising and pretending to be populist, while arrogantly betraying everything your uniform and status stood for. Have we moved on since a priestly hypocrite singing boogie-woogie in a hospital was considered progressive?

On Monday, the three Augustinian priests who "concelebrated" Mass with a Church of Ireland priest on Easter Day apologised unreservedly, having "reflected on the seriousness of their actions". The faithful expressed amazement and horror. They believe that feeling amazement and horror over the apology represents their own progress from the dark days. It represents nothing more than theological ignorance and the same old brain-washing: that the church is really "grand", if only it could get with the spirit of the times.

The Rocky Road to Dublin expressed the view that Vatican II "badly shook the Irish hierarchy". It did nothing of the sort. Indeed, a senior statesman of journalism, who accompanied the Irish bishops home from Rome on that occasion, once told me that they more or less sniggered their way through the journey, airily certain that nothing would change. They controlled the education system and the hospitals through the religious orders and the Roman Catholic-dominated ethics committees. They still do, and still believe that they have a right to their arrogant high-handedness, because they are the representatives of God on earth.

Take what happened on Monday at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. Sister Helena O'Donoghue, a senior nun of the Order of Mercy, denied claims of abuse in a reformatory where children had burns and bruises on their bodies, and where even she admits that "on occasion", children were denied water after teatime. (They were "only" denied water in cases of bed-wetting; bed-wetting beyond the toddler stage frequently indicates severe emotional trauma, by the way.)

I remember a caller to RTE's Liveline several years ago, saying that she was one of those children, and that she and her companions used to drink water from the lavatories when they became desperate with thirst. A good, practising Roman Catholic (and he is indeed a good man) told me flatly, at that time, that he didn't believe the woman. It couldn't have happened, he said. Well, even the nun who claims the reformatory and the nuns running it are being "vilified" admits it did happen.

Just as she told the commission that she did not accept an observation by another nun, Sister Fabian, a former resident manager at Goldenbridge, that the ethos of the place had been "excessively and generally cruel, even by the standards of the time" when another nun, Sister Bernadine, ran it. Sister Fabian characterised Sister Bernadine as a "hard and rigid woman", a "paranoid schizophrenic" who "established a reign of terror". Another nun, Sister Xaviera, described Sister Bernadine as a "harsh, aggressive and unpredictable personality".

The two nuns made the claims in an investigative report into Goldenbridge, commissioned as far back as 1995 by Sister Helena O'Donoghue herself. That report was commissioned when public unease was reaching fever pitch about what had happened to small children abandoned by the State through no fault of their own.

Time has moved on; we are concerned with other matters in our prosperous, dangerous post-9/11 world. In any case, the report was an internal one, possibly intended never to be made known to anyone outside the incense-laden air of the Roman Catholic authorities. But it had to be discovered to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

And in this world, where we have made progress, where the Roman Catholic authorities no longer hold authoritative sway, a nun feels free to make claims that she and her sisters have been "vilified" for the way children under their care were treated in the dark, cold corridors and dormitories that smelled of urine and hopelessness. She claims that the nuns who made the statements about excessive cruelty are now unhappy about how they were interviewed for the report in which they gave their awful testament.

"Recant!" hisses the officer of the Inquisition, iron-nailed whip raised. Or is my historical imagination too powerful?

I had a conversation with a lawyer at a seminar during the week, and we agreed that the fact that many women who have been raped are prepared to make their names known, represents progress. Because a woman who has been raped has nothing to be ashamed of. But in times past, they thought they should be ashamed. They were taught to be ashamed in the religious institutions. They danced before the camera for Peter Lennon in 1968, in Ireland's sad ballrooms, and never raised their eyes.

When are we going to learn that the men and women who imposed that misery and shame will never change? They do not believe they have anything to apologise for.

I believe they would behave the same way given half the chance. It is their God-given right: to deny it is to vilify them. And we still say they are of value in our education system; we even say that without them the children of Ireland would have been without education. The day we will have made progress will be the day when they are banished from the education system, and driven out of the health system.

Emer O'Kelly


? Irish Independent

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