Another example of the Catholic Church’s excellent track record of looking out for the least among us:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were regularly sexually and physically abused by nuns, priests and others over a period of decades in hundreds of residential institutions that housed the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys,” the report said, adding that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions…

It is no longer so shocking to hear that such institutions were rife with violence and abuse, or that the Catholic and government establishments colluded; this has been openly discussed for years. But the report, by the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, exposes for the first time the breathtaking magnitude of the problem, and shows how an entire establishment in an overwhelmingly Catholic country seemed to collude in perpetuating a cruel and sadistic system.

The report is 2,600 pages long, took nine years to prepare and reflected the anonymous testimony of 1,060 former students from a range of 216 institutions, including reform schools, orphanages and hospitals, from a period spanning, for the most part, 1930 to 1990. Most of the former students are now aged between 50 and 80.