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. Wednesday's five-volume report on the probe - which was resisted
by Catholic religious orders - concluded that church officials
shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of
self-serving secrecy.
