How Evil Can Mask as Piety
Christine Buckley, who was one of the first to break silence in the early 1990s on the church’s institutional abuse of children, said the report’s verdict on church and government failings should demonstrate “whether the journey for justice, undertaken by so many and for so long, has at last been successful.”
She, like many campaigners, said it was critical that the truth of their brutal childhoods be placed indisputably on the public record after decades of dispute from the religious orders — principally the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy nuns — that ran Ireland’s 19th century-era industrial schools and other state-funded refuges for Ireland’s most vulnerable children. Most closed in the 1970s.
Typically, children at such facilities stopped receiving any formal education by age 12. But they kept generating income for the religious orders through their teens with their mandatory, unpaid labor on farms, in laundries and as domestic cleaners.
In Buckley’s case, she was consigned to a Dublin orphanage in the late 1950s because she was the child of a single Irish mother and Nigerian father; children born out of wedlock typically were placed for adoption or into state care.
This story relates to me as I came to the USA in 1956, and went through Catholic Grammar School. I left them as a Church, yet came back to spirituality of the Traditional African Relgion. I do not believe in religion, yet respect it as a social tradition, it is a Way of Life we must forge, and must start with this:
Consideration for others is the basic of a good life, a good society –Confucius
Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Evil enters like a needle and spreads like a oak tree Ethiopia
