Don't Forget O.C.'s Abusive Irish Catholic Priests!

Lenihan, second from right, in a picture Brown Stalinized

The Catholic world is abuzz with the release of a 2,500-page report by an judge documenting decades of physical and sexual abuse suffered by children in Ireland's Papist-run institutions. The report's release is a sad confirmation of the thesis put out by author Joe Rigert in his excellent 2008 book An Irish Tragedy: How Sex Abuse by Irish Priests Helped Cripple the Catholic Church. He posited that Ireland's repressed sexuality created a culture where child molestation was pandemic, and that the exportation of the country's priests to the United States unleashed an invasion of monsters on our shores. Couple that with Roman Catholicism's hierarchy of silence, and an American scandal was born.

Of course, the Diocese of Orange is never far from pedo-priests, and Rigert mentions the most notorious example: John Lenihan, my childhood priest who proved so scandalous that Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown infamously Stalinized him out of a picture in the diocese' official history book. But O.C. also suffered other mick molestors: John Kenney, Richard Coughlin, Robert Foley, and Daniel Murray are just the most notorious. Am I missing any, gentle readers?