#68: “The Ryan Report: Just Another 30,000 Bad Beat Stories”

So get this. I’m in this orphanage in Dublin. It’s 1969 and today is my 10th birthday. I’m not really an orphan but my mother gave birth to me out of wedlock so I was taken off her as a newborn and sent here. The priests who run the orphanage are friendly most of the time – “Make your 60 rosaries a day without messing and you won’t get a beating”. It’s a fair deal and they keep their end most of the time.

So this morning, I’m finished serving mass. I’m in the Sacristy, taking off my cassock when the priest comes in. He tells me that because it’s my birthday, I can have some altar wine. I take a big gulp and soon after feel a bit funny. Next thing I know, the priest is touching me in a strange way. I try to leave but he grabs me. He makes me touch him. I start to cry. After he finishes, I’m so upset after that I go back to my room and start punching myself in the face.

Luckily my face heals. Later that day, another priest comes into my bedroom. I tell him what happened and he tells me that I deserved whatever I got. He tells me that my mother didn’t love me, that I am a bastard child and I should be grateful to have a home at all.

The next day, I tell my best friend what happened. I ask him if I should write a letter to the police. He tells me that there’s no point. He says that the last kid who did that was beaten so badly that he never came back from the hospital. He says that what happened to me happens to everyone here from time to time.

I write my letter anyway and a few days later, a policeman comes to visit. He brings me to the police station and asks me about what happened. I tell him and he tells me that I am lying. I swear to him that it is the truth and tell him that it has also happened to lots of my friends. He tells me that I am a trouble-maker and that if I don’t stop making up these stories, he’ll put me in prison.

That night, I am beaten and raped by two of the priests at the same time. When they are finished, they spit on me and tell me that I am going to Hell. They tell me that I better get used to it and do you know what the weird thing is? I did.

Forty years on and I am celebrating my fiftieth birthday. Opening the newspaper, I read how the members of the clergy involved in child sex abuse are being publicly commended by the Archbishop of Westminster, Rev Vincent Nichols. According to him, it takes great ‘courage’ for them to confront their actions. “I think of those in religious orders”, he says, “who have to face these facts from their past which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at”.

I am thinking of them too. I am thinking about how dreadful it must be for them, but how brave they are to come forward and talk about what happened. The poor men. They will beg for mercy. They will say they are being persecuted. But they will receive no sympathy or compassion. Because, as I know only too well, nobody likes listening to a bad beat story.