This survey is flawed because the word 'religious' has all sorts of suggestive connotations and not everyone who could be so characterized would readily self-identify as such. I can just imagine many of my co-parishioners asking themselves, 'Religious? Oh no, not me. I just go to Mass and pray the Rosary'.

It would have been more meaningful if the survey has asked whether the individual practices a faith, if he/she believes in God or an afterlife, and if he/she prays regularly, etc.

Mantus: "The percentage of accused priests in the US is about 10 percent or 10,969[...]So pedophiles’ in the clergy are at a rate 20-200 times greater than in the general population"

This is a non sequitur. The figure you give relates to *accused* priests (innocent until proven guilty, remember?) not priests who have been convicted of an offence, which is undoubtedly much less.

Anyway can I ask for a scholarly source for this claim? The John Jay survey found that 4% of US priests serving between 1950 and 1992 had been accused of abuse.

You're wrong to assert that priests are more likely to be paedophiles than the adult male population as a whole. This article in Newsweek (a highly liberal anti-Catholic publication) argues that the opposite is true: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/07/...

Stalin's Soviet Union, a member of the Allies, killed over 40 million people. Much worse than Hitler.

Christieboy, I am not aware of any evidence that the children were intimidated or were made swear an oath forbidding them from reporting Smith's crime to the authorities, or indeed anyone else. You are confused as to the exact nature of the oath prescribed.

Here is a press release from the Catholic Communications Office a few months ago:

The following is a correction note from the Catholic Communications Office regarding the Irish Indepedent article "Revealed: Oath taken by Smyth, children, and Brady" by Breda Heffernan published yesterday, 18 March 2010.

In relation to the wording of the oath involved in the 1975 enquiry involving the then Fr Seán Brady and concerning Fr Brendan Smyth, the published words used in yesterday’s Irish Independent (18 March 2010) were incorrect. The wording of the oath is as follows:

“I [name] hereby swear that I have told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that I will talk to no-one about this interview except authorised priests.”

In addition, the following sentence was included in the second oath:

“So help me God and these holy Gospels which I touch.”

Authorised priests in this case refers to the personnel who were taking evidence. The intention of the oaths was to avoid potential collusion in the gathering of the enquiry’s evidence and to ensure that the process was robust enough to withstand challenge by the perpetrator, Fr Brendan Smyth. It was understood by canonical personnel in Ireland that the oaths were no longer binding when the taking of evidence from all witnesses was complete

"The shameful behaviour of Cardinal Sean Brady was recently exposed where he intimidated two child victims of the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth into silence"

I am not aware of evidence that those children were intimidated into anything. Oaths of secrecy are temporary and are only used for information given in ecclesiastical trials; they do not preclude anyone from reporting crimes, or giving information, to the police.

"it uncovered thousands of cases of sexual abuse and cruelty against Catholic children in Catholic run Institutions"

No it didn't. There were 88 claims of sexual abuse from the pre-1960s, 119 from 1960 to 1969, 37 from 1970 to 1979, and nine from 1980 to 1989. A third of those complaints referred to lay staff (care workers, cleaners pupils etc)

As David Quinn pointed out in Studies magazine:

"As mentioned, a total of 1,090 former residents of the institutions reported to the Ryan Commission. Between them, they named 800 alleged abusers in over 200 institutions. But there was very wide variation from institution to institution in terms of the amount of abuse taking place in each of them, something that the executive summary of the Ryan Report, which is what most journalists will have read, did not make clear. For example, fully 50 per cent of physical abuse reports and 64 per cent of the sex abuse reports heard by the Commission that involved boys, related to four of the boys institutions. The same applies to the girls’ institutions. Three schools account for almost 40 per cent of the physical abuse reports, or 48 reports each, while 19 schools had an average of 2.5 reports each.

Sexual abuse was also far worse in the boys’ institution than in the girls’, which is probably to be expected. In the girls’ institutions, sex abuse was normally perpetrated by outside workmen, or by visiting priests or religious, or by foster families, with whom the girls occasionally stayed.

A relative handful of individuals accounted for a disproportionate share of the complaints. For example: a total of 241 female religious were named as physical abusers. However, four of these were named by 125 witnesses, and 156 Sisters were named by one witness each. In total, of the 800 religious and others named as abusers, half were named by only one person.

It is also worth noting that an institution only received a special chapter in the Ryan Report if it was the subject of more than 20 complaints of abuse. Sixteen institutions, out of the dozens run by the orders, had more than 20 complaints made against them."

The story that the Pope said Mass for William's victory is apocryphal and likely not true.

No, integrated education is not a good idea. What we need is a breakup of the controlled sector. I suggest selling schools back to the churches, community groups, parental associations, cultural groups etc. Then implement a Swedish style system where the government gives each parent one voucher per child (to cover the average cost of educating one pupil for a year), and allow the parent to redeem the voucher at any school of their choosing. That would mean a parent could send their child to an Irish-medium, Chinese language, Presbyterian, Anglican, Catholic etc educational institution. This would take away power from bureaucrats and return it back to parents. United in diversity is better than one size fits all.

BTW such comments were quite mainstream in pre-WW2 Europe. Churchill was in doubt about the alleged peril Jews posed to Britain.

True but you can't count it like because not everyone in the population is equally and so rawly exposed to children. The Catholic Church had a near monopoly in the care and education of children in the Republic of Ireland. In the United States, teachers likewise make up a massively disproportionate share of abusers. And almost all of this abuse is historic, when there were a lot more clergy than there are today...in the 1950s one in eight secondary school children went on to become priests.