Madam, - It is somewhat of an understatement to say that there has been a continuous flow of vehement, public denunciation of certain religious orders who allegedly participated in the cruel mistreatment and abuse of child-inmates of industrial institutions and orphanages throughout the 1950s and earlier.
However, instead of joining unthinkingly in this chorus of denunciation, we might be better served by adopting a critical re-evaluation of the historical period concerned.
Perhaps, instead of isolating the religious orders for special stricture and condemnation, we ought to focus on the totality of society at that time and the peculiar contemporary culture which permeated it. On the basis of anecdote we may say that all manner of individuals and miscellaneous groups (including journalists, politicians and academics) collaborated and participated in the social phenomenon which we now label "child abuse": if only in the sense that they collaborated by their passive silence and non-intervention. Unconsciously, they colluded in a cover-up by simply tolerating and ignoring the problem.
In contemplating this phenomenon, our response, instead of mindless condemnation, ought perhaps to be one of critical, yet sympathetic understanding. The challenge facing us today is not simply to condemn but to attempt to understand how society itself in all its various ramifications, including high-placed individuals and influential groups, behaved and comported themselves throughout a peculiar historical period which is a certain mental and temporal distance from our own standpoint today.
Such behaviour (institutionalised child abuse) has its roots in the past.
The important task for us is to make an unprecedented adventurous leap of historical imagination and, aside from condemning the phenomenon, to attempt to analyse the values of that society at that time: to attempt to understand what made the society of that day tick in the way it did - what made its social agents behave as they did.
Why some behaviours, actions, attitudes and values did not then have the same obvious urgency and importance as they patently have for us now today; this is a question which must challenge all reflecting people; it must challenge our critical, analytical faculties rather than exercise our simplistic moral indignation. - Yours, etc.,
THOMAS P. WALSH, Faussagh Road, Cabra, Dublin 7.