In a previous posting, I criticized the Notre Dame protesters for protesting against abortion instead of child raping priests. Instead of trying to reduce women to the legal status of incubators, they had a moral obligation to lead a major campaign for serious action in the Catholic Church against child raping priests and the clergy who protect them.

It turned out that my commentary was prescient. Three days after my post, a report in Ireland detailed massive physical abuse and rape of children in Catholic schools in that country. From Reuters 5/20/09 (Hat Tip Ten Percent):

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Priests beat and raped children during decades of abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland, an official report said on Wednesday, but it stopped short of naming the perpetrators.

Orphanages and industrial schools in 20th century Ireland were places of fear, neglect and endemic sexual abuse, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse said in a harrowing five-volume report that took nine years to compile.

The Commission, chaired by a High Court judge, blasted successive generations of priests, nuns and Christian Brothers -- a Catholic religious order -- for beating, starving and, in some cases raping, children in Ireland's now defunct network of industrial and reformatory schools from the 1930s onwards.

An interesting aspect of the Notre Dame misogynython was that it was organized mostly by Catholic priests. It's pretty obvious now that the Catholic church leadership knew the report was coming and decided to stage a media circus to keep American eyes off of the international problem of sexual and physical abuse of children by Catholic priests.

It worked. The Irish report got far less media coverage here than it deserved, being one of the most important international news stories of May 2009.