But for all these revelations — including this month’s Pennsylvania
grand jury report on how the church hid the crimes of hundreds of priests — a darker history, the one to which Sally’s story belongs, remains all but unknown. It is the history of unrelenting physical and psychological abuse of captive children. Across thousands of miles, across decades, the abuse took eerily similar forms: People who grew up in orphanages said they were made to
kneel or stand for
hours, sometimes with their arms straight out, sometimes holding their boots or some other item. They were
forced to eat their own vomit. They were dangled upside down out windows, over wells, or in laundry chutes. Children were
locked in cabinets, in closets, in attics, sometimes for days, sometimes so long they were forgotten. They were told their relatives didn’t want them, or they were permanently separated from their siblings. They were sexually abused. They were mutilated.
Darkest of all, it is a history of children who entered orphanages but did not leave them alive.
Christine Kenneally / BuzzFeed News:
Nuns Killed Children, Say Former Residents Of St. Joseph's Catholic Orphanage — Millions of American children were placed in orphanages. Some didn't make it out alive. — It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.Elaine Godfrey / The Atlantic: The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Half StaffBarbie Latza Nadeau / The Daily Beast: Catholic Church Clergy Sex Scandal: Even the Pope Can't Stop the Bleeding Now
3 comments:
I read that article earlier today. Part of my father's family was Catholic - one of my cousins married a priest's niece, which was a Big Deal in the parish - but I always felt icky around their faith and very ambivalent about the experience of kids I knew who went to Catholic schools. They sort of boasted about the petty tyrannies of the nuns (at the same time informing me I would burn in Hell because I was a Lutheran).
Now as an outsider and an atheist I can't grasp why people allow themselves to be even emotionally abused by a church, let alone why they tolerate a regime that's proven over and over again that it can't be trusted not to commit horrible crimes. I agree with the article's contention that people are concentrating on the sexual abuse charges to avoid thinking about the murders. I wonder if the dead will ever be avenged. The unfortunate part of being an atheist is the knowledge that justice does not exist outside of this life, and we are the ones who must demand it.
i was in a catholic ortphanage, run by the sisters of mercy. it was the saint joseph's home for boys and girls. if i could i would go back to pittsburgh burn the damn place down and sow the ground with salt. most of those nuns are surely dead now. but i bet they had some nunsplaining to do when they met zombie jeebus! i can attest that nuns i had were violent
Pope Francis needs to be arrested and sent to the "pound him in the ass prison" for the rest of his life. Although he might enjoy that.
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