If any place illustrates the depth and depravity of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — and why the Irish are so angry about it — it is this unlikely corner of the country, where among rolling hills of wild heather, castles and bucolic fishing villages, predatory priests terrorized children with impunity for decades.
County Donegal, which overlooks the Atlantic in northwestern Ireland, has fewer than 160,000 residents, but it may have the worst record of clerical abuse in the country. According to a watchdog group that monitors the Catholic Church in Ireland, 14 priests have been accused in recent years, four of whom were convicted.Interestingly (and consistent with this lede, I suppose), the headline in the digital version of the story doesn't mention rurality. It is "Pope to Visit Ireland, Where Scars of Sex Abuse Are 'Worse than I.R.A.'" Another digital headline for the story is The story also mentions the recent release of the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Report about a week ago, which gave rise to this NYT story focused on a Pennsylvania community's surprise that their beloved priest of many years had been implicated in the scandal. Ah, but on second look, I see that "Holy Angels Parish" is in Pittsburgh. Though the photo appears to be that of a rural-ish church, it is apparently close enough to or/within greater Pittsburgh to merit that dateline. Still, the suggestion of a rural locale reminds me how a parish--especially a small-ish one--is like a rural community: everyone knows everyone.
The media focus on rurality in these stories of clerical sexual abuse may suggest a couple of ways in which rurality is salient to what happened in these places, but what are those rural angles? lack of anonymity, remoteness from checks and balances of higher scale institutions, or something else?
The second story with "rural" in the headline is on page A10 of today's NYT, about Randolph County, Georgia's proposal to close 7 of 9 polling places. The print headline reads, "Proposal to Close 7 of 9 Polling Places in Rural County Hits Nerve in Georgia." The digital headline, perhaps updated after my west coast paper went to press, indicates resolution of the issue: "Georgia County Rejects Plan to Close 7 Polling Places in Majority-Black Area." In fact, Randolph County itself is majority African American, 62%. And in case you haven't heard, an African-American woman is the Democratic Party nominee for governor (though this move would be outrageous even if that were not the case).
Further, Randolph County has a poverty rate of 22.8%; the rate for families with children is close to 40%, and that for families with a female householder exceeds 40%. I can't easily find data on the availability of public transit in Randolph County, but suffice to say, closing a majority of polling places in the county would have effectively disenfranchised lots of poor people--many of them African-Americans. I'm glad to the see the county doing the right thing, even if it took lots of media pressure, which raised awareness to make it happen.
As for the use of "rural" in the headline, I'm not sure what work it does for the Times headline writers/editors. Is it meant to convey political cunning on the part of local government? naivete of constitutional norms? out of the mainstream? Randolph County is certainly rural, with a population under 8,000. It is worth noting that Georgia counties are very small in terms of land area. The state is divided into 159 counties with an average size of 374 square miles. Those are small counties by any state's measure, but they are especially small compared to the typical county in a western state.
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