Growing up in an Irish Catholic family in America, the talk was generally about how terrible the English treated the Irish, which remains true. They also left, eventually. As a student, I hitchhiked across Ireland and remember talking with an Irish traveler who countered that argument and said the Catholic church did much worse and was much more destructive to Ireland. The Catholic church has never gone away. The report today is pretty rough though the cowards inside the church were still able to keep their names out of the report. If the EU had any spine they would press for more details and shame these people, if not bring them up for trial.
The consistent and disturbing reality of the long awaited report is that the Catholic church has made extra efforts the world over to cover up crimes. They have no moral authority at all. None. The offenders and church leads who hid this are truly despicable. What's the penalty for such crimes?
The report concluded that church officials always shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and, according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many pedophiles were serial attackers.
The investigators said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.
"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.
