Secrets & Lies

Francis Beckett

This summer the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien said that sex education in schools was like “state-sponsored sexual abuse” of children. And the Catholic Church should know a thing or two about sexual abuse of children.

It knows about other sorts of abuse too. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, in some British Catholic schools, hundreds of childhoods were blighted through sexual abuse, beatings or simply lack of care.
Everyone knows Catholic priests abused and brutalised children in other countries. In the USA, the Los Angeles Diocese alone recently paid out $660 million to settle 550 cases out of court. In Ireland one Catholic order, the Christian Brothers, was forced to take advertisements in all the country’s national newspapers in 1998, apologising for years of brutal beatings and abuse.

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