To feel relief at my mother's being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant's daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven's choir. Then came the Ryan Report.
Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the "Spotlight" series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland's residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.
The Ryan Commission published its 2,600-page report in 2009. Despite government inspections and supervision, Catholic clergy had, across decades, violently tormented thousands of children. The report found that children held in orphanages and reformatory schools were treated no better than slaves—in some cases, sex slaves. Rape and molestation of boys were "endemic." Other reports were issued about other institutions, including parish churches and schools, and homes for unwed mothers—the notorious "Magdalene Laundries," where girls and women were condemned to lives of coercive servitude. The ignominy of these institutions was laid out in plays and documentary films, and in Philomena, the movie starring Judi Dench, which was based on a true story. The homes-for-women scandal climaxed in 2017, when a government report revealed that from 1925 to 1961, at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, in Tuam, County Galway, babies who died—nearly 800 of them—were routinely disposed of in mass graves or sewage pits. Not only priests had behaved despicably. So had nuns.
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