How difficult is it to be a Catholic now?

Your reading of the statement doesn't sound like distancing to me, I thought it sounded genuine and appropriate. But I suppose we all read between the lines based on our own subjective views.

I don't understand the logical connection of your last sentence Jess M. Did you read the second link I posted? Was this the result of the size of the RCC? Or indeed action by the RCC?

The church is indeed huge, but to describe it as a single entity with all members believing, acting and thinking in the same way is a huge misconception.

No one is denying the many evils perpetrated by some members of the RCC, but it is not unique in having members who fail to adhere to its core principles.

Most institutions can become currupt and autocratic if they are not held in check. Unfortunately after independence in Ireland the Catholic Church was basically told to deal with education and some other welfare issues and the Irish state opted out of checks as to what was going on.

The moral of this is that all institutions must be held accountable, must be frequently inspected for signs of maltreatment of people and so on.

You have to assume that schools, hospitals, prisons churches and so on, can easily become corrupt and damaging to people. But, alas, vigilance is often ignored.

Thank you MiceElf for the link. And apologies for not reading the original in full before. However I still think it is a very "distancing" comment.
I think the difference between abuse that springs up in a children's home and abuse that has occurred in the Catholic church is that the church is a huge, wealthy, global business that for centuries ruled European culture. Popes ordered kings to start wars. Many thousands were tortured and murdered for questioning its rules and beliefs.
It is still immensely powerful and immensely lacking in humility, which is one of the "virtues" that it preaches and pretends to. It has a long and inglorious record of guarding its own reputation by covering up crimes and misdemeanours committed by its officers. It is misogynistic to the core.
So that is why i would argue Flicketyb that this sad story is not just an Irish story, because it is a direct result of the global rule of the Vatican.

As for cover ups and disgraceful treatment, sadly Ireland does not have a monopoly. Here is just one example:

isnblog.ethz.ch/government/dirty-swiss-secrets

For those who would prefer to read what the 'senior cleric' actually said rather than rely on selective reporting here is the statement:

tuamarchdiocese.org/2014/06/statement-of-archbishop-neary-in-support-of-home-inquiry/

Martin Sixsmith, author of the book on Philomena, has written here,
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2651484/I-thought-Id-seen-Philomena-And-I-nuns-secret-grave-800-babies-By-Martin-Sixsmith-exposed-Sisters-sold-children-fallen-girls.html

Single sex institutions in isolated places, often seem to breed a culture of bullying, whether English public schools or convents.
What is maybe different about this current Irish case is that it is not just a case of victimising the supposedly immoral girls but failing to give basic care to the children they were looking after. But it may be a while before we find out what happened. Presumably there are still some older women around who remember being inmates there.
Eloquent and interesting posts Flicketyb but - well - do you use the first world war and the aftermath to excuse the ways the nazis behaved to jews and other minorities in the second war? Because starving babies to death, if that is true, is not so different is it.
I note that a senior cleric has already started the process of distancing today's church from the atrocities of the past. What's new?
In the film Philomena, based on true events, it was 21st C nuns who were covering up what happened in the past and deliberately hiding the truth about adoptions from those who came to them to enquire.
The current pope is obviously hoping to use his massive PR machine to try to get people to put the sex abuse scandals into the past and think he is a jolly nice chap.

I enjoyed reading the book too Terri

Whilst doing part of my training in a psychiatric hospital I was shocked to read some of the case notes regarding patients who had been there 30/40 years due to their mother being raped by their grandfather. It was assumed these babies would be mentally impaired but sadly that was not the case although they remained in the hospital unable, after too many years of being institutionalised, to live independently in the outside world.

Impressive posts flickety and mice elf. Agree will everything you both say.

No point in repeating it. There are good and bad everywhere, even in RC schools and the church. We need to learn from the past and endeavour to ensure that these things should not happen again.

TerriBull I know exactly where you mean. I used to visit one of those when I worked in L.B Hackney. Many were built out there in the early 1900s to actually provide the patients with a healthy country environment.

Given the state of many inner city living conditions at the time it was an enlightened approach, although it left patients far away from familiar environments.

Yes Marelli, Maggie O'Farrell

As a child I went to 10 schools in total, some catholic, some secular, many of the teachers at the catholic schools were not only not nuns but not catholics either and I really cannot say that there was ever much difference in the behaviour of teachers in any of the schools, whether nuns or not. There were nice ones and ones that scared the living daylights out of me, sarcastic ones that made me shrivel up and work badly and incompetent ones. Some nuns I liked, several I loathed. Talking to DH my experiences at school were no worse than his.

I think the biggest difficulties were for those of us who were in the boarding house of our predominantly day convent grammar school. Many of the nuns had joined the order in Ireland and were a product of it's culture. Some were highly intelligent and intellectual and in the stultified culture of Ireland at the time, becoming a nun and going to France for the novitiate and training as a teacher must have seen an opportunity to good to miss - but they then found community life and teaching teenage girls who left school for work or further education just as they became interesting was still limiting and frustrating and they did at times take it out on us.

But compared with stories I have heard from other boarding schools of my era, mine was in no way exceptional.

A very good book, Terribull. I read it a few years ago -was it by Maggie O'Farrell?

I think it would probably be fair to say that the treatment of unmarried mothers back in the 20th century up to relatively modern times could have sometimes been harsh wherever they lived, although Ireland does seemed to have a particularly horrifying record.

I grew up in a town in Surrey that was well known for it's "mental hospitals". One of my closest friend's mother was a psychiatric nurse in one of them. My friend recently told me that many of the inmates were young unmarried mothers who were incarcerated in these places for many years because they would have been deemed, at the time, to be mentally unstable when in fact all that had happened was that they had become pregnant outside marriage, shock horror! I don't know if any GNs here have read the excellent book, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which dealt with this very subject.

I was brought up a catholic. My father was born into an Irish immigrant family, they had been in the UK a few generations 3 or 4 I'm not quite sure. He had 7 siblings, 1 sister joined an enclosed order of nuns, The Poor Clares, another joined some other order and lived out the rest of her life in Melbourne, in a home for "wayward women" , a third sister went into service.
The whole family brought and hung onto all of their believes and tradition in the UK through the generations. I was always told sex was "dirty" but it became clean if you got married ???? If I had got pregnant before marriage I would of, without a shadow of doubt been sent away, because to them it was the worst sin anyone could commit. I went to the same church as them and never got the impression it was the church which condemned people as much as my family

FlicketyB Yes excellent posts, which gives a perspective to social situation in Ireland well into perspective.

Catholicism

My Mother was catholic and my Father was Protestant. When I was 8yrs old, a neighbour 'reported' my Mother to the local priest. I stood at our door with my Mother as the priest berated her for marrying a Protestant and told her I was a bastard. My normally mild mannered Father eventually heard the conversation and told the priest in no uncertain terms what he thought about Catholisism. That was in 1958. My Mother also told me her experiences at her convent school and the cruelty of the nuns.

I wasn't raised Catholic but my late DH born and raised in Ireland was and he had nothing but praise for the nuns and brothers who taught him. His was a very poor family and he had endless stories of the kindness and help they received. He had great respect for the local priest, nuns and brothers yes they were strict but he never mentioned any cruelty. Thats not to say it didn't happen in other areas, just that wasn't his experience.

Irosesarered, I was brought up a Catholic and your comments about nuns being absolute bitches certainly resonates with me. I don't think I have ever encountered such spiteful people, one or two exceptions, but in the main they were horrible. Never got over being given the blackboard rubber on my hand, the hard wooden bit, aged 7 for supposedly looking insolent. As far as I was concerned I was sitting at my desk facing the front and trying to pay attention. At my convent senior school we weren't allowed to make eye contact with the nuns, it was deemed as "being bold" instead we were expected to stare at the floor. Sounds positively Dickensian, but again only the '60s. Today of course not making eye contact would be a cause for concern.

And in England and Wales unmarried mothers were put in workhouses and asylums by their parents. Mothers were forced to give up their babies for adoption by their parents, girls were subjected to illegal abortions, the more affluent families paid for their daughters to have abortions in nursing homes - where the girls went to recuperate from nervous ailments !

Sexual abuse was rife in childrens homes and let's not forget the many children who were shipped off to Australia

No one knows how many of those babies born in Ireland were conceived through rape, a frightened girl would cry rape rather than admit she was 'willing'

Follow the North Wales abuse enquiries, a judge can order the names of alleged abusers should not be made public for fear they may sue the council.

Thatbags I was going to say exactly the same as you.The Catholic Church is not just any old 'big institution' that seeks to cover up wrongdoing to children.Whatever problems people experienced in Ireland in the past, all the nuns I came into contact with in the 1950's and 60's were [except one!] absolute bitches to children, especially girls, who they came down harder on than boys.Not talking serious abuse here [although it was verbal and physical abuse for no good reason.]They may well have been 'in the wrong job' but they had a cushy life here.However, I agree it's not just Catholic priests/nuns doling out cruelty and abuse, but they should be THE LAST people doing this, as Jesus says [written in the bible] 'suffer the little children to come unto me' [and goes on to say how anybody hurting a child should forget about Heaven for themselves.]Do you think this has been misunderstood as 'make the little children suffer'?

The church does not teach that there is no morality without faith and religion.

As for cover ups, they are to be abhorred and condemned wheteber they occur, but that is not exclusive to the church. Just take a look at what happened in Rochdale or the BBC or in many children's homes or in homes for the elderly.

Sadly, all big institutions seek to protect themselves. They shouldn't, but they do.

Good post, flick, as always, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. The RC church sets itself up to teach morality and pretends that you can't have morality without faith and religion, so I don't think it is unjust when it appears that more blame is attached to it for wrongdoings within it. Besides, it hid the abusers so that they went on to abuse again.

No, not moral self-righteousness, one cannot be self-righteous about events like these, but it is only in recent years when I have visited Ireland and learnt more about the nitty gritty of the oppressive measures inflicted on the catholic Irish after the battle of the Boyne and the casual cruelty and neglect of absentee English land owners that I have begun to understand why so many Irish are still willing to support the IRA and vote for Sinn Fein.

I also came to understand how a community ghettoised and cut off from any wider life in its own country can turn in on itself and develop a culture that can be as hard on its own as the outside world is on the embattled community.

Sexual abuse in the catholic church constantly attracts attention because as a world wide organisation cases will occur within the church in almost any country, but in Britain is it anymore endemic in the catholic church than in local authority children's homes? In the last week there have been appalling revelations of systemic sexual abuse in Rochdale, and there have been a series of previous revelations and probably more to come about similar abuse in other LA children's homes. We have had cases recently that reveal the extent to which sexual abuse occurred within boys prep schools and do you remember all those jokes about vicars and choir boys, totally unacceptable now. It is also clear that within the entertainment industry until recently there has been an acceptance that sexual abuse of all kinds has been tolerated and accepted by most of those working in the industry at every level

Yet LA children's homes and prep schools are not demonised because of the incidence of sex abuse within their organisations nor has there been wholesale damnation of show business because so many of its members felt they had right to sexual molest any member of the public who came within their life and career. That the catholic church should be condemned for its protection of those within its community who abuse others is absolutely right, that it should have to take blame to a greater extent than other communities where abuse was systemic and organised in a way that did not happen within the church is unjust.

Sorry my link fell off my last posting.
Catherine Corless talking in a video from the Irish Times.
www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/coalition-willing-to-widen-tuam-inquiry-to-other-institutions-1.1822892