KEVIN CULLEN in Boston
AN AMERICAN watchdog group says it is preparing an American version of the Ryan report to document the abuse of children and young adults in institutions run by religious orders in the United States.
It says it is also building a pair of databases that will name Irish priests and religious who abused minors in Ireland.
Officials at BishopAccountability.org, the Boston-based group that grew out of the scandal of the cover-up of sexual abuse of minors by priests that rocked the US Catholic Church seven years ago, said they were inspired to compile evidence of institutional abuse at some 1,000 institutions across the United States after reading the Ryan report.
Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, said the Catholic Church in the US was modelled on the Irish Catholic Church. Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of priests in the US were Irish. To this day, about two-thirds of American bishops are of Irish descent.
“The Irish story is our story in America, too,” said Mr McKiernan, whose grandfather left Leitrim for Harlem.
Officials at BishopAccountability.org said they doubt their report will be as exhaustive as the Ryan report. “We do not have the resources of the Ryan commission, but we will try to emulate what they did,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org.
“In the United States, there has been a lot of attention paid to the abuse carried out by diocesan priests and covered up by bishops. The Ryan report made us realise that we have not had a similar accounting of the abuse at orphanages, boarding schools and minor seminaries run by religious orders in the US.”
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