What, didn't I sell this article? You'll puke!
Everyone is busy maintaining the sanctity of off-blog vomications.
I actually didn't read any of the PA abuse stuff, because I feel like I know the outlines of it all*. But this was basically all news to me, and just stunning. The combo of "here's documentary evidence that these fuckos lied their asses off" (to the writer, to the courts, to everybody) and "here's contemporary corroboration of pretty much all of the stories" was an incredible coda. Pulitzer-worthy (but seems to have gone down the memory hole already).
Another thing: mean nuns is a well-worn trope, so there was kind of a framework for understanding the evil. And yet, it's so far beyond yardsticks-on-the-knuckles.
Or it's not.
Finally: this is all so hard for me to get my head around. I was raised Catholic, briefly attended parochial school, was devout until just a few months shy of college graduation. Shit, I met, and possibly served Eucharist under, Cardinal Whuerl.
But NONE of this is recognizable to me. I never heard any stories or rumors, I never had an evil nun teacher (Sister Mary Francis or whoever it was who led my kindergarten was maybe a bit stern), I never experienced any of the tropes about the Catholic Church (cue minor key organ). So it's just so weird. It's not like puzzle pieces falling into place, it's like finding out that what you thought was a jigsaw puzzle was actually a D&D game and the DM is a literal demon.
My longtime take has been that I DGAF about the RCC, but it's a less malign influence in the world than white American evangelicalism, but it's hard to think that anymore.
Although, Christ, did you see the minister at Aretha's funeral trying to cop a feel on Ariana Grande?
Fuck this world.
trying to cop a feel
He did more than try.
As a general rule, I think if you have something that can be called a "fiefdom," someone is going to be abused.
I've never been to a televised funeral. I'm going to have to miss my great uncle's because work is just too much now. Last WWII veteran in the family.
On topic because it's a Catholic funeral.
5.last: yeah, for every Pat Buchanan on one side there's a Jozef Tiso on the other.
I'm not qualified to defend this, but I have the impression that the RC Church, at least in hte High and Late Middle Ages, made really critical contributions to Western civilization through the development of things like canon law, administration, and universities; and, down to the present, conducts a huge amount of genuine philanthropic work. To my knowledge American evangelism has no such offsetting virtues.
13: evangelicals also do a huge amount of genuine philanthropic work. This, for example https://www.namb.net/southern-baptist-disaster-relief/
Yes, they evangelize alongside it; still counts.
Procedural liberalism, (which is pretty darn substantive, including separation of church and state). Abolition.
I'm probably using a broader definition than you are. Where do you put Roger Williams?
I have no idea who Roger Williams is. I was thinking of modern megachurches, Jerry Falwell and the like. You're clearly talking about a much wider set.
This guy, I assume. On the face of it I have trouble putting him in the same bracket as churches which vote for Trump.
Between Dave Weiner and Kim Wilson.
After reading the piece about Catholic orphanages, I read today's Guardian article "'Barbaric' school punishment of consequence rooms criticised by parents" with a feeling of recognition:
One mother, whose son goes to an Outwood Grange school in Wakefield, said her son had lost days of his education sitting in a "consequence room". "It's a small booth. They can't look left or right, they can't look behind. They have to focus in front all the time. They can't speak to anyone for the whole day. It's basically an internal exclusion. It's barbaric," she said.
The common factor seems to be institutions that are out of their depth, combined with lack of public accountability and oversight. In the orphanages piece, a bishop is reported as saying, "Well, these nuns were just frustrated ladies. They didn't have children of their own, and they didn't know how to handle them."
English "Academies" are state-funded schools that are outside of the control of education authorities -- they are supposed to be non-profits but many are actually businesses run by political cronies and chancers, who extract their profits by paying themselves inflated salaries. This profit-extraction leads to downward pressure on the numbers and quality of the teaching staff, leading to the kind of abuse described by the Guardian.
Mossy, you can watch this whole ten minute thing, or skip the first 3 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQqyyKhWDjM
and once you get to the abrupt end, you can see if the rest of the broadcast is available for streaming.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?304243-1/roger-williams-creation-american-soul
20 minutes into that talk,
1. (Nitpicking maybe) Those doctrines didn't come out of anything American but primarily English politics.
2. In New England the Puritans (which I take it you're counting as American evangelicals) were on both sides the church/state dispute (Winthrop against Williams).
Winthrop explicitly making Scripture superior to secular law?
We live today in Williams' world, not Winthrop's.
My question is how representative Williams is of evangelism. My overwhelming impression of American politics is that religious people of any kind only want separation of church and state when they don't control the state.
I dimly remember RI being a stubborn outlier at the constitutional convention (over what became the 1st amendment?). I guess Williams' ideas eventually prevailed, but looks like a minority view.
Barry himself says Williams was an extreme outlier in freedom of conscience.
I don't disagree with 29 -- the dispute continues, and the people now calling themselves evangelicals are taking the wrong side of it -- but if the question is whether American evangelical Protestantism has ever made any contribution to humankind, along the lines of the contributions of Catholicism in 13, I'd count Williams and his descendants in the broader set.
32: Ok. I'll still niggle on the "American" though. Barry is pointing mostly to his influence on English liberalism.
31 In the 17th century, yes.
30 RI did not participate in the Constitutional Convention, and explicitly rejected ratification. The US then threatened a trade embargo, and RI really had no choice.
34.2: Huh. Why did they reject?
34.1: I think that's actually still a minority view today, in the world in general and among US evangelicals in particular (which Barry also says). The point of that isn't to deny that any contribution was made, but to deny that that contribution was representative of evangelism (though I have to stand to be corrected on that).
Slavery. Invalidating state issued paper currency. Fear that other states would fuck them over.
Under the Articles, every state had a veto on amendments, and RI had exercised it. Trading down from that the 2 senators was a big step.
Well if you're the size of Rhode Island getting fucked over is on the cards regardless, no?
Anyway, that talk was very interesting, thank you. I have read about Cromwell at some point but ugh.
Rhode Island always has Providence.
I surely cannot be the only one to feel a tad sceptical over some of the details of this appalling story? Multiple child murders, and apparently no bodies ever found, or ever reported, is what gives me pause....
Excessively vulnerable (and morally "stigmatized") children in the hands of crazy religious fanatics: I have no reservations whatsoever in assuming egregious child abuse and despicable wanton cruelty. But "we saw nuns kill children" (not a child, but children in the plural), in 20th-century America (Vermont!)...eh, I dunno, but is this really credible?
Again, I'm not denying the culture of abuse and exploitation, but the multiple murders charge does sound a bit 'Satanic ritual abuse' to me.
41 There have been bodies of infants and toddlers found by the hundreds in Scotland and Ireland in the last few years. I'm actually surprised that there are only a few suspected murders in this case.
I think of those as being essentially post-term abortions, right? Which is different than murdering an older child. (But I also didn't have JPJ's reaction to the article.)
I haven't seen reporting on postmortems but I have a hard time believing that doesn't include a lot of cases of outright infanticide and abuse.
At the mass grave in Tuam they found bodies of children as old as 2-3 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_and_Baby_Homes_Commission_of_Investigation#Excavations
"the multiple murders charge does sound a bit 'Satanic ritual abuse' to me."
The analogy doesn't work because in the ritual abuse hysteria there was no credible evidence for _anything_. No one was saying "Oh, sure, I accept that there were Satanist groups abusing kids in a lot of day care centres in the 1980s. That's been adequately proved by now. I just think it's ridiculous to suppose they ever actually killed anyone."
The Catholic church in Scotland is now reduced to putting out statements saying "nothing to do with us, those nuns are a completely separate organisation" which would be Father Ted worthy if it wasn't so bleak.
When they found that mass grave in Ireland a couple of years ago I did the math, it came to something 1.5 burials a month for 40 years.
With that much abuse of that much severity it would be frankly amazing if there had not been some deaths. And those deaths would be murder. No intent to kill is required for a death to be murder; the intent to harm, in such a way that death is a possible and reasonably foreseeable consequence, is enough.
And I liked "in 20th century America!"
The deaths in Tuam were likely mainly from (criminal) neglect, malnutrition, hypothermia and untreated illnesses. There may have been many of course that were caused or contributed to by beatings /assault.
I hadn't read the Buzzfeed link until seeing JPJ's 41. Like JPJ, I have some experience with the Church, and so I will sign on to her statement: "I have no reservations whatsoever in assuming egregious child abuse and despicable wanton cruelty."
But the Buzzfeed story is terrible journalism.
JPJ offers Satanic Panic by way of analogy; ajay sees a parallel with Scotland; others look to Ireland.
I propose a parallel with the Rolling Stone rape story: Something that a careful reader would see was built on shoddy reporting, even though the underlying phenomenon - campus rape - is well understood to be a common phenomenon.
This story probably won't be debunked the way the RS story was. The "facts" in it are largely uncheckable. But like the RS story, you can see by reading it that it that the author didn't engage in ordinary journalistic due diligence.
I'm sure there are issues with the story, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
It's still much more tasteful than it used to be around here.
50 seems a little harsh when you consider that the reporter did things like this:
I went through every death certificate for Chittenden County and Burlington from the 1920s through to the 1980s. It was easy to find the 1961 notice about Marvin Willette, the boy whose body had been hauled out of Lake Champlain and laid on the sandy shore. But he was the one child whose death was not in dispute, having been featured at the time on the front page of the local paper. (I even found it in the Sisters' newsletter, the Chronicles.) I looked for Sally Dale's falling boy...In the end, I was not able to find any other witnesses or documents to confirm the story of the falling boy... Sally's account of the burnt boy always seemed to me to be the most far-fetched of all the stories about dead children. It worried me. If this was just a fantasy, what did it mean for the rest of her testimony? I wanted to look for the burnt boy, but I didn't even have a name. Then one night as I scrolled through the death certificates again, I found the death. It was an accident, not a deliberate killing. On April 18, 1955, Joseph Millette, 13 years old, died from overwhelming electrical burns. It happened at a power station after Millette "crawled under a high tension wire and made contact through metal helmet."
Sally Dale had been right all along...When asked under oath about children dying at the orphanage, the doctor who served there during those years said that he didn't recall any deaths at all. But I found two death certificates for babies from St. Joseph's that he himself had signed. I also found another death certificate for a baby girl, who died shortly after a breech birth. Her home address was listed as "311 North Avenue," the address of the Catholic Charities offices next door to the orphanage. No one lived there.
I mean, it's so ridiculously long I just accidentally opened my ebook reader instead of switching tabs, but that's just an aesthetic problem.
And it makes a certain sort of psychological sense, doesn't it, in context.
T******r accuses her political opponents of supporting policies that will create disastrously high unemployment. Donald Trump accuses his political opponent of being crooked and colluding with Russia. The Bush campaign accuses its political opponent of being a fake hero who avoided combat. The Catholic Church accuses its political opponents of killing babies.
I appreciated 51.
50: I agree most of the claims will ultimately be unverifiable. But it's a very large number of claims, many of them made independently, many of them under oath, consistent in their specifics with one another and consistent in pattern with large numbers of similar cases elsewhere which have been demonstrated to be true. I see no particular reason to think even the most lurid claims are false.
41: Multiple child murders, and apparently no bodies ever found, or ever reported, is what gives me pause....
Significantly misrepresents the piece. Deaths were reported, with death certificates. The story requires only that medical authorities didn't bother to investigate causes of death too closely, in maybe a half-dozen cases. That's entirely plausible. The only case matching JPJ's description is a child supposedly born to a nun and smothered the next day. That could easily have been concealed so long as the pregnancy had never been reported outside the orphanage, also easily done.
The only case matching JPJ's description is a child supposedly born to a nun and smothered the next day.
Oh, and, hey, the reporter found a death certificate from the right period for a newborn child supposedly born in the uninhabited Catholic Charities offices, right next to the orphanage, that the doctor said under oath that he couldn't remember anything about.
55-56: Yeah, it's long, and with something like this, you want to take it sentence-by sentence to get a real feel for the reporter's credulity, omissions and misdirections. But the discussion of "recovered memory" shows you the lens through which this reporter is looking:
In sex abuse cases across the United States, defense lawyers had started to challenge recovered memories.
This is presented as a bad thing. The scientific challenges to recovered memory are never explained, and Kenneally simultaneously makes it clear that the story is highly dependent on such memories without being specific about which stories were the result of such memories.
But Anna Salter, an expert in the psychology of predators and victims, testified that ... what tended to come through with recovered memories was the overall narrative -- not necessarily all the specific details.
So even by the testimony of a sympathetic witness, recovered memories are reliable not for their detail, but rather for their gestalt. And yet, the specific details are essential to the story.
Recovered memories are a real problem, and objections can't be lightly dismissed, the way the author does throughout this story. Here, for instance:
A woman said she'd watched a nun hold a baby by its ankles and swing its head against a table until it stopped crying. As Sally listened to the awful stories, something ruptured inside her. She shook her head and began to say, "No, no, no, no, no, it's not true." But the memories were already flooding back.
Though the reunion was a two-day event, Sally left that first afternoon with a crushing headache. The next morning she had diarrhea and was unable to speak without heaving. She spent that night sitting bolt upright, remembering things she hadn't thought about for decades, and saying, "No, no, no, no, no." When her husband asked her why she was saying "no," she just replied, "No."
This isn't presented as a discussion of the problematic nature of Sally Dale's memory, or (amazingly) even as a description of the process through which she recovered her memories. It also isn't made clear which abuses were corroborated by her denial that they occurred.
Joseph Barquin, the other key figure in the story, disappears near the end of the story. Here is his final appearance.
Barquin's sense of reconciliation with the giant institution proved to be a powerful one. He reversed course and started contacting Widman's other plaintiffs, trying to persuade them to abandon their legal counsel.
In an interview with the Burlington Free Press, Barquin said that he wanted to find a non-adversarial way for his fellow orphans to resolve their claims. "Rage and anger is never going to work for the future of these people," he told the reporter. Barquin began to phone Sally Dale to suggest that he could have the bishop and some nuns drop by her house to talk about things. Dale, who was horrified by the suggestion, said no.
I'd like to know a lot more about Barquin's "sense of reconciliation." Did Kenneally even ask him? If she didn't, that's a gross journalistic lapse. If she did, and doesn't report the result, that is also unacceptable.
There's a lot more that could be said, often about the details that aren't in the story. This piece is a million words long (my estimate), but omits huge amounts of key detail about the many, many individuals whose testimony was relied upon.
One example:
Roger Barber spoke next. Sally remembered him saying that a nun told a group of older boys to rape him.
Was he raped? Of course, it's a horrible story regardless, but that's a detail that ought to be disclosed. We have Sally's memory of what Barber said, but what does Barber say about what he said? What did Barber tell Kenneally about the nun and the boys? Anything? We aren't told.
As with Erdely and the Rolling Stone story, it seems likely that Kenneally believes her own tale. But her epistemic approach to this is really awful.
A competent editor would not have permitted the publication of this story in this form.
I agree with almost everything in 62. I don't think Barquin's reconciliation is especially significant, albeit interesting. The recovered memory problem is indeed huge, but I stand by 59. We have a great many independent gestalts pointing in the same direction.
Comparing it to the Erdely fiasco is unfair - that was a case of taking one witness and accepting her facially implausible story without any effort at checking (even to the point of asking "you fell through a glass coffee table without cutting yourself at all?") This has multiple witnesses, much of whose testimony is backed up - as she points out - by independent reporting. (The electrocution death, for example.)
64: Sure, Erdely's story was subject to a lot of investigation, and her professional malfeasance eventually became indisputable. That's not my point.
What I'm telling you is that in the absence of any subsequent investigation, you could tell that Erdely fucked up in real-time, just by reading the story.
(Did Erdely acknowledge in the story itself that the "victim" wasn't cut? I remember that detail as a product of the subsequent investigation, but I could be wrong. Anyway, you can have mishaps like that and not be cut. I once watched a guy walk through a glass door without injury.)
The key hole in Erdely's story was her decision not to interview the alleged rapist. That failure was evident from the original story, and it's not acceptable.
Please note: "Jackie's" story could have been true, and certainly parts of it were corroborated -- Erdely didn't get everything wrong. But there are methods that journalists use to find out what's true, and Erdely, like Kenneally, didn't employ them.
63: Yup. Lotsa gestalt. You really can't libel the Catholic Church any more, especially as regards the institutional treatment of children. Stuff like this is certainly true (as JPJ and I acknowledged upfront).
Bits of Kenneally's story resonate with my own experience. In my Catholic school, we were compelled to squat for long periods, sometimes with books on our outstretched arms. But here is Kenneally's description:
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.
Nowadays, the cognoscenti call that sort of thing "stress positions." But try standing for "hours" with your arms outstretched, especially holding boots. You'll last a lot longer than a kid would, but you won't last "hours," even under the threat of harm.
(I can testify, though, that under such circumstances, a very short period can seem like hours.)
Nowadays, the cognoscenti call that sort of thing "stress positions." But try standing for "hours" with your arms outstretched, especially holding boots. You'll last a lot longer than a kid would, but you won't last "hours," even under the threat of harm. (I can testify, though, that under such circumstances, a very short period can seem like hours.)
From personal experience, you are wrong. Yes, you can't last hours _without interruption_. But what happens is that every time you lapse out of the stress position because of muscle fatigue you get beaten and forced back into it. Under those conditions, you can indeed last hours.
Also, "the cognoscenti" is a funny word to use for "people involved in the care and rehabilitation of victims of inhumane treatment, and in enforcing laws and conventions prohibiting it". It sounds more like "pantywaist liberal handwringers who don't know what it's like in the real world".
67: Understood. I see that I erred by generalizing from my own experience.
As for "cognoscenti," I intended that as a sarcastic reference to the people who employed the practice, and not to the people who deal with the damage from it, though I can see that I wasn't completely clear.
I think the journalist here did a lot more than the RS journalist, but also agree with pf that I was left a lot less convinced of the more lurid charges than the author seemed to be. No doubt, this is because she looked into the eyes of the witnesses, and I haven't. The story is, in the main, absolutely believable, and I think an editor could have decided to make the lurid charges more peripheral, but then it might not have gotten as much attention . . .
Because it isn't journalism, it's outrage porn.
Gotta meet the audience where they are.