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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEmer O'Toole to the Irish Bishops: Tell us where the rest of the bodies are.
The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns.
Locals have known about the grave since 1975, when two little boys, playing, broke apart the concrete slab covering it and discovered a tomb filled with small skeletons. A parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten.
The Tuam historian Catherine Corless discovered the extent of the mass grave when she requested records of children's deaths in the home. The registrar in Galway gave her almost 800. Shocked, she checked 100 of these against graveyard burials, and found only one little boy who had been returned to a family plot. The vast majority of the children's remains, it seemed, were in the septic tank. Corless and a committee have been working tirelessly to raise money for a memorial that includes a plaque bearing each child's name.
For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them.
According to Corless, death rates for children in the Tuam mother and baby home, and in similar institutions, were four to five times that of the general population. A health board report from 1944 on the Tuam home describes emaciated, potbellied children, mentally unwell mothers and appalling overcrowding. But, as Corless points out, this was no different to other homes in Ireland. They all had the same mentality: that these women and children should be punished.
Ireland knows all this. We know about the abuse women and children suffered at the hands of the clergy, abuse funded by a theocratic Irish state. What we didn't know is that they threw dead children into unmarked mass graves. But we're inured to these revelations by now.
Corless expresses surprise that the media were so slow to report her story, that people didn't seem to care. If two children were found in an unmarked grave, she observes, it would be news; what about 800? But what is the difference between the wall of lies, denial and secrecy the church constructed to protect its paedophile priests and a concrete slab over the bodies of 796 children neglected to death by nuns? Good people unearth these evil truths, but the church always survives.
The archbishop of Tuam and the head of the Irish Bon Secours sisters will soon meet to discuss the memorial and service planned at the site. The Bon Secours sisters have donated what the Irish TV station RTÉ describes as "a small sum" to the children's graveyard committee.
Father Fintan Monaghan, secretary of the Tuam archediocese, says: "I suppose we can't really judge the past from our point of view, from our lens. All we can do is mark it appropriately and make sure there is a suitable place here where people can come and remember the babies that died."
Let's not judge the past on our morals, then, but on the morals of the time. Was it OK, in mid-20th century Ireland, to throw the bodies of dead children into sewage tanks? Monaghan is really saying: "don't judge the past at all". But we must judge the past, because that is how we learn from it.
Monaghan is correct that we need to mark history appropriately. That's why I am offering the following suggestions as to what the church should do to in response:
Do not say Catholic prayers over these dead children. Don't insult those who were in life despised and abused by you. Instead, tell us where the rest of the bodies are. There were homes throughout Ireland, outrageous child mortality rates in each. Were the Tuam Bon Secours sisters an anomalous, rebellious sect? Or were church practices much the same the country over? If so, how many died in each of these homes? What are their names? Where are their graves? We don't need more platitudinous damage control, but the truth about our history.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/04/children-galway-mass-graves-ireland-catholic-church
valerief
(53,235 posts)Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)"Do not say Catholic prayers over these dead children. Don't insult those who were in life despised and abused by you. Instead, tell us where the rest of the bodies are."
niyad
(113,303 posts)factsarenotfair
(910 posts)her family staunchly refused to send her to one of the homes for unwed mothers. She later fled Ireland for England in shame without her son Richard at the age of 19, but sent for him later after she got married in London. She endured decades of physical and mental abuse in that marriage but was too ashamed to get a divorce until she found out her husband was having an affair. She writes about her life in "Cry Salty Tears."
It's a good thing she refused to go to one of the homes and give up her child.
me b zola
(19,053 posts)factsarenotfair
(910 posts)I guess my favorite genre is biography/autobiography. I learn a LOT.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)Warpy
(111,257 posts)I think the Irish are likely suffering a great deal of outrage fatigue by now. I know many fellow atheists I know in real life survived the Irish church here and in Ireland.
The church has a hell of a lot to answer for, most especially in Ireland, where the theocratic nature of it made damned sure no questions were ever asked.
The nuns dumped nearly 800 children into a hole with shit at the bottom, and nobody cared.
I wish they'd start caring now.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)I feel quite good with judging them on our 'present' morals, they haven't changed all that much
Tsiyu
(18,186 posts)Starve babies, refuse them basic medical care, and when they die, throw them in a shit hole.
Gotta love religion, and pro-lifers particularly.
Sick, twisted, manipulative vermin: I wish most of the forked-tongued, violent religions would just go away and die. They serve no one but the elite of these faiths, who live like kings while they suck coins out of the pockets of the hungry.
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)Ugh...and throwing imprisoned kids they killed by neglect into a SEPTIC TANK?
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
And all sanctioned through the theocratic state. Ugh.
Misogyny kills, alright.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)The born, not so much.
MattBaggins
(7,904 posts)We can question the past and the evils that the Church did.
RainDog
(28,784 posts)...with the pedophile priest scandal across Europe - and the U.S. - and Latin America.
It got so bad Pope Bennie decided to disallow people to officially leave the church, as of 2009.
http://www.thejournal.ie/count-me-out-closes-because-of-catholic-church-defection-system-chage-1028259-Aug2013/
When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, "Nobody's perfect," we said, "Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop."
The expression was more accurate than we knew. This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology -- of sorts -- to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. To many people in my homeland, the pope's letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children.
I experienced this personally. When I was a young girl, my mother -- an abusive, less-than-perfect parent -- encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored "Magdalene laundries," which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests' clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.
An Grianán was a product of the Irish government's relationship with the Vatican -- the church had a "special position" codified in our constitution until 1972. As recently as 2007, 98 percent of Irish schools were run by the Catholic Church. But schools for troubled youth have been rife with barbaric corporal punishments, psychological abuse and sexual abuse. In October 2005, a report sponsored by the Irish government identified more than 100 allegations of sexual abuse by priests in Ferns, a small town 70 miles south of Dublin, between 1962 and 2002. Accused priests weren't investigated by police; they were deemed to be suffering a "moral" problem. In 2009, a similar report implicated Dublin archbishops in hiding sexual abuse scandals between 1975 and 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032502363.html
I wonder how many of those girls were abused by priests - and how many of those children in that septic tank are their children?