From the story in today’s New York Times about the Catholic Church’s network of children’s schools in Ireland for the “poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted,” run in Christ’s name by sadists and sexual abusers. I happen to know a woman who was raised in one of these houses of mercy; she confirms what the church had managed to keep hidden until the 1990s.

The devil, as usual, is in the details:

Some of the schools operated essentially as workhouses. In one school, Goldenbridge, girls as young as seven spent hours a day making rosaries by stringing beads onto lengths of wire. They were given quotas: 600 beads on weekdays and 900 on Sundays.