Naked Villainy: The Sickness At The Heart Of The Catholic Church

"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends stol'n out of Holy Writ
And seem the saint when most I play the Devil."
- Shakespeare's 'Richard III'

By Charley Brady

We knew that it would be bad. We knew that it would be grim. Yet I doubt that anybody realised how grim and awful it was going to be.

The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse is a report on what took place in Catholic- run industrial schools - or as one survivor put it, concentration camps - from the 1940s through the 1990s, when the government and their masters in the church conspired to cover up the beatings, the torture, the ritual humiliation, the rapes and the murders of thousands of innocent children.

We might not have this report even now but for the painfully honest people on both sides of the camera who were responsible for the RTE documentary, "States of Fear" in 1999. It might have eventually just gone away, as so many dirty secrets do in this laughably named Isle of Saints and Scholars. It just might have joined the myriad of things that have been brushed under the carpet because the Irish spent so long in thrall to a corrupt corporation like the Catholic Church, where NOBODY, nobody at all was willing to upset the power of a well- organised group of Holy Men and Women who were considered, in that most odious of terms, to be the pillars of society.

Now, after ten years and €70 million we have a report that shows at least 800 monsters who are living or were living in our midst with our complicity and cowardice to shield them and who will still never be named or prosecuted, despite the files unearthed against them, because to do that would be to open even wider the lid on the horror that was ignored for decades; and because this is Ireland where even now some fundamentalists are claiming that it never happened.

Doesn't that have a familiar ring to it?

The Catholic Church has for all that time been the biggest and most successful paedophile ring of sadists and brute animals that this sorry globe has ever produced.

And yet, despite the fact that any other corporation with so many genuinely evil men and women on its board would be dismantled immediately and we would see prisons stuffed full of these aberrations, come Sunday we will instead still see the "faithful" bending the knee at "Holy Mass", just as the monsters did.

I have often wondered, both here and in other publications, as to why on earth anybody would bow down and worship at the feet of a horribly mutilated man who has been nailed while living to a Tree of Death. Now I know.

It is because the alters are as caked in innocent blood as the alters of any ancient Mayans, whom we would have the gall to call savages.

It won't make any difference to those who trundle off to church on Sunday but here are some words from the survivors that deserve to be heard and I don't care if it upsets you as much as it does someone like me, who was lucky enough to have had a happy childhood rather than a state of perpetual terror. These voices need desperately to be heard:

"Brother X came and pulled me from my bed into his bedroom. He turned his wireless up to full volume and said, 'Take that nightshirt off, you can scream now as much as you like, you little bastard.'

"He masturbated himself while he was hitting me with his strap.

"The Resident Manager knew what was happening. The Brothers were sadists, they were evil and cruel. Of course they knew what was happening."

Another:

"One Brother kept watch while the other abused me. Then they changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again."

Another:

"Brother X sent for me. I had to go to his room and he said, 'Kneel down and close your eyes.' He put his penis in my mouth and I opened my eyes and he boxed me in the eyes."

There is more, so much more and incredibly, so much worse, but I wouldn't wish to put you off your prayers.

Perhaps you could discuss it after Sunday Mass when you're waiting to shake the priest's hand in order to show him that you were there and to thank him on an enlightening and uplifting sermon.

Children in their sick beds, some with polio, being abused; an enormous group of truly evil people calling themselves priests, nuns and Christian Brothers who were so rightly sure of their untouchablity that they would commit their crimes in front of each other; horror piled upon horror for children who had to endure year after year of rape and torture and often even death, which must have come as a blessed relief.

Good old Ireland: the Education Department, under Batt O'Keefe, was unable to tell us yesterday why files on individual sex abuse allegations have gone missing as recently as 2001. Well, I could hazard a guess and would certainly love to see some of the names on those files. We could play a sort of warped "Where are they now?" regarding the rapist criminals and see where they are working at the moment.

When I say that files are missing, I of course mean that 27,000 FILES ARE MISSING!

Maybe they were simply mislaid. Yeah, I think I'll go for that one.

The usually-dependable Kevin Myers wrote in Friday's Irish Independent of his disdain for journalists being emotional in their reporting of this appalling period in Irish history, doing a supposedly funny skit on it. He says that, like the Famine, it can never happen again. Who's being naïve now, Kevin?

Journalists have kids that they care for, just like anyone else. Who says that we can't feel as sickened over this report as does every right-thinking man and woman in the country?

I don't have children, but it doesn't stop me from feeling physically ill when I read details like "...prolonged excessive beatings with implements intended to cause maximum pain occurring with the knowledge of staff management." So I can only imagine how those with children that they would literally give their lives for are feeling.

Things got heated, naturally, and one survivor asked: "Why are we being excluded? We have been marginalized as children and we are being marginalized again."

In the name of whatever tattered fragments of sanity are left in this benighted country, aren't these the very people that the report was published for?

It even reached a point where the police were called and I can only imagine that they were as embarrassed to be asked to get heavy-handed with abuse victims as the rest of us were.

When the law of the land is asked to turn on people in pain and who simply want a voice because of something unspeakable that has been done to them by Church and State, we're really into something strange and totally corrupt. And Myers thinks that this thing is over?

So this wonderful country of the welcomes treated these people like vermin for decade after tortured decade, doing everything it could to make them feel useless and pathetic, only to do it again yesterday at the Conrad Hotel. Nothing ever changes.

We just keep the jackboot on the same unfortunate people over and over. I took a break half-way through this piece and while I was fixing myself something to eat I had a memory flash back to years ago.

In the place where I was working at the time a very pleasant little nun used to come in every Friday and buy a half bottle of red wine. She was always polite and with a sweet sense of mischievousness about her. I asked her about her routine once and she told me that herself and another nun enjoyed a glass on a Friday while they watched the soaps.

I suppose that the reason that I thought of her for the first time in years was because I tend to forget that there are good priests and nuns out there, who are being tarred with the same brush as the monsters.

Yet there is no doubting that the Catholic Church has become a huge faceless conglomerate that is so removed from its followers as to almost be in a different galaxy.

And, corporations being what they are, this is where the money problems have already begun. Sure, the Bishops and the Archbishops and at some stage probably even the Pope will trot out the usual bilge about "new beginnings", "lessons learned" and "forgiveness". It will of course be claptrap as normal.

In the end, though, it will come down to the money. The idiots in power - I won't say in charge as even at that point it was the Catholic Church that was running the show - at the end of the 1997-2002 Fianna Fail/PD government allowed themselves to be bullied into a shoddy, half-thought-out deal that allowed 18 religious groups to pay only €128 million in compensation to thousands of the victims of their systematic reign of terror against children.

As we now know the claims will total around €1.2 BILLION. So once more Johnny Taxpayer is left to foot the bill. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan is already making noises indicacating that it would be illegal to ask the church for more so it seems likely that they'll get away with paying about 10% of what they should be paying.

Yes, as many politicians are saying, this is the church's legal right. I would mention their moral right, but what is the point: in two thousand years the Catholic Church has shown consistently that it has NO INTEREST in morals unless there's a greasy coin in it for them.

Don't be misled by their pretty frocks and their back to front collars. These are tough and serious people for whom the ONLY important thing is money. Otherwise the Vatican would sell off just a handful of its vulgar icons and just do the right thing and hand over the money.

But you can't argue with single-minded clerics who, when finding that they have a rapist in their parish, simply move him on to where he can do more damage.

One question that I keep hearing being asked is: "How far up do you think the cover- ups went?"

Even before publication of the report I never doubted that it went all the way to the top. Here's a quote from John Cooney's outstanding study "John Charles McQuaid-Ruler of Catholic Ireland":

"'I was flogged by John Charles McQuaid', says Robert Geldoff, father of the famous Bob.

"'I had to kneel down and lift up the shirt after being reprimanded for impudence for defending another student who was victimised by a priest unfitted for the Black Rock classroom after a traumatic spell in Africa'".

This was in Black Rock, a million miles from the suburbs of hell mentioned in the report. Do I think that it went even higher? Oh yes. Look at how many files were in the Vatican itself.

There are 3,000 pages of this report to be assimilated so there will probably be more to say, but let's not go without mentioning good Christian Archbishop Vincent Nichols who praised the rapists for their "courage" in facing up to their mistakes.

Apart from the fact that they didn't, and will not be punished for them anyway, this just shows again what I always say: The Catholic Church is sick and corrupt to its core.

And it will never change.