'In Treatment' star Gabriel Byrne reveals childhood abuse

Blames Catholic celibacy vows for priests' cruelty

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Gabriel Byrne as therapist Paul Weston in HBO's "In Treatment"

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Irish actor and “In Treatment” star Gabriel Byrne has revealed was physically abused by Catholic priests as a child, but he doesn’t blame them – he blames their celibacy.

The Golden Globe winner and star of the HBO hit series recently told Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” about his school days with the Christian Brothers, a teaching order “known for their strictness, rigidity and Victorian approach to discipline,” he said.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child was their, was their kind of philosophy,” said Byrne. “And sometimes that resulted in inhumane and cruel treatment of people who were in their charge. I say that not with any anger but just as a fact.”

Byrne went on to tell about the Christian Brothers’ daily cruelty towards children, which was “just the status quo” at the time.

“I was just looking at…a diary that I had kept, like a kind of child’s diary at the time, and I confided to this diary that I didn’t know why I was being hit because I didn’t understand, you know - if Jack has three stones in his pocket, and Tom has four stones in his pocket, how many stones does the Bishop of Cork have if he lives in Paris, or something meaningless like that, you’d say I have no idea what that means, and they’d hit you anyway,” he said.

Byrne vividly remembers specific instances of the physical abuse he received.

The Irish actor said: “I do remember winter mornings with one of these men, you know, who’d had a brain operation and now read everything upside-down. So we all had to learn to read things upside-down on the blackboard so that we wouldn’t, you know, rise his anger.

“And this guy would just give you what he called 12 of the best on each frozen hand, I remember, in wintertime. That may sound a little, you know, Dickensian and dramatic, but it was the truth.”

Byrne attributes the Catholic priests’ cruel behavior – from the hitting to more serious allegations of physical abuse – to their trying and hard-to-keep vow of celibacy.

He said: “When you have men who have taken a life oath of celibacy and they are denied the basic comfort of human connection and warmth, and celibacy is something that I absolutely detest within the Catholic Church, I think it’s an appalling outrage against humanity…I’m not really a religious person, but it’s not like Christ came down from heaven and said, look, okay, you’ve all got to be celibate. It was something that was introduced in the 11th century so the church wouldn’t have to pay the dependents of priests who died.

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