05-21-2009, 07:43 AM
<b>Catholic Church shamed by Irish abuse report</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->DUBLIN â After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland's castaway children.
The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of <b>revelations about child molestation by priests</b>.
The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.
Wednesday's five-volume report on the probe â which was resisted by Catholic religious orders â concluded that church officials shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.
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<b>The Christian Brothers, which ran several boys' institutions deemed to have harbored serial child molesters and sadists on their staff, insisted it had cooperated fully with the probe</b>. The order successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.
The Christian Brothers' leader in Ireland, Brother Kevin Mullan, said the organization had been right to keep names secret because "perhaps we had doubts about some of the allegations."
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The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of <b>revelations about child molestation by priests</b>.
The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.
Wednesday's five-volume report on the probe â which was resisted by Catholic religious orders â concluded that church officials shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.
...............
<b>The Christian Brothers, which ran several boys' institutions deemed to have harbored serial child molesters and sadists on their staff, insisted it had cooperated fully with the probe</b>. The order successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.
The Christian Brothers' leader in Ireland, Brother Kevin Mullan, said the organization had been right to keep names secret because "perhaps we had doubts about some of the allegations."
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