Endemic Abuse At Irish Catholic Care Homes

DUBLIN — 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 revelations about child molestation by priests.

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.

A government-appointed panel has paid 12,000 survivors of the schools, orphanages and other church-run residences an average of $90,000 each _ on condition they surrender their right to sue either the church or state. About 2,000 more claims are pending. Irish Catholic leaders cut a controversial deal with the government in 2001 that capped the church's contribution at $175 million _ a fraction of the final cost.

read more here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/20/irish-reform-schools-thou_n_205719.html

and here:
On the Net:

Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse report, http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/

...and you all thought Alphonse François de Sade was just kidding, tsk tsk.

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