Sins That Cry Out To God

There are certain things in this world that are likely to tip me into molten, incandescent rage. One is cruelty to children.

In Ireland, there is a system of Catholic-run schools for the children of the poor, and these schools were the scenes of utter depravity between the 1930s and 1990s.

One victim’s memory of sadistic torture at the hands of a nun:

I was hit for having red, curly hair. You had to have straight hair like Our Lady. This sister was a monster. She’d drag you into the office and take her long cane and just beat you and beat you. She had a bamboo cane four feet long. She’d be frothing at the mouth. She’d say, “You curled your hair last night,” and when I’d say, “Yes, I curled it,” she’d stop. She had castor oil, she would press it into my head, to make my hair straight. My face would be swollen from the beatings, the oil would be running down my face.

This next testimony is especially appalling:

I was an animal lover. There were wild cats and kittens going around starving, and I used to sneak them into the dormitory. i had a kitten. This nun called me one night. She said, “You see that kitten you have there?” She got me out of bed by the hair and brought me down, they had one of those stoves that you put coal in the top. She said, “Take that top off.” I had to go up on my knees. I had to put the cat in there and put the lid on it — and the screams. Then she said, “Go back to bed.” The next morning, she got me out of bed and she made me rake that fire out. I think I was about twelve at the time.

I am used to praying for God’s mercy on the souls of sinners, especially me. I prayed that God may be merciful to the man who paralyzed, and ultimately killed, my late older brother.

There are, however, some offenses that make such prayers very, very hard to offer. For a representative of Mother Church, a person whose job it is not just to teach the faith, but to model in some way God’s loving relationship with his children, to force an animal-loving, born-into-poverty little girl to burn her kitten to death is definitely in that fucking category. It would have been bad enough for the sister to kill the kitten; for her to make the little girl do it…like I say: incandescent rage.

I try, but I can’t think of an excuse for that nun. I can’t think of anything that might lessen her culpability. I can’t imagine how utterly depraved someone needs to be, how completely destroyed someone’s conscience would have to be, so that she could possibly commit an act of such heinous brutality.

I also can’t find an excuse for a Church in Ireland that allowed such a system to thrive (there’s no other word for it) in its institutions for decades. These two incidents are not the isolated depravity of a couple of demented monsters; they are quotes from a report published by a government-appointed commission. So it was not just “a few sisters” and “isolated cases of a few priests.” It was a system. There was a culture in these schools that let such comprehensive abuse continue for decades, by both priests and nuns. That government report is two thousand six hundred pages long.

I went briefly to a school run by the same order (the Irish Christian Brothers) that ran many (but not all) of the schools in Ireland. There was one brother in my school who took an inordinate interest in the boys’ locker room at shower time, and would find an excuse to make the students do push-ups while naked. That same brother had a fearsome reputation as a “disciplinarian.” I think those two things are related; in fact, I think they are the same sin, expressed two different ways.

The Catholic Church in America has historically been heavily served by Irish priests and religious, and the relatively commonplace memories of Americans of a certain age of brutal sisters and sadistic brothers has very much to do with that fact, I believe. And it was not just in elementary and high schools; seminaries also had their share of bullies and sadists: there was a priest I knew who, when he was a young seminarian and confessed masturbating, was assigned the penance of kneeling on his fingers on a flagstone floor and saying 100 Hail Marys.

We need to pray for the victims of the sadism of these Irish religious and lay priests, brothers and nuns, that they may retain their faith, and their capacity to give and receive tenderness and love. And we need to pray for the perpetrators, and especially for their enablers.

The Church needs to determine what factors caused such a culture to thrive in its institutions, and ensure that such factors are comprehensively rooted out. This must never happen again.