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Omaha Steve

(99,079 posts)
Sun Jun 8, 2014, 10:55 PM Jun 2014

Catholic leader seeks Irish probe into mass graves

Source: AP-Excite

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DUBLIN (AP) — Ireland should investigate the Catholic Church's mistreatment and burial of babies who died decades ago in nun-operated homes for unmarried mothers, a senior church official declared Sunday as the country confronted another shameful chapter of its history of child abuse.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made his appeal following revelations that hundreds of children who died inside a former church-run residence for infants were buried in unmarked graves at the site in western Ireland.

Martin said the probe should have no church involvement, be led by a judge and examine the treatment of children in "mother and baby homes" for unwed mothers and their newborns. These mostly operated in Ireland from the 1920s to 1960s, when Catholic policy and control of social services reached their zenith in post-independence Ireland.

Typically, the women's families and wider society had shamed and rejected them because of their pregnancies. Babies born inside the institutions were denied baptism and, if they died from the illness and disease rife in such facilities, also denied a Christian burial.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140608/eu-ireland-childrens-mass-graves-02bc5a71c1.html





FILE- In this Thursday, May 10, 2012 file photo, Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin attends a press conference, at the Vatican. A senior Catholic Church figure says Ireland{2019}s government should establish a fact-finding probe into the church{2019}s mistreatment and burial of babies that died in nun-operated homes for unmarried mothers. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made his appeal Sunday following revelations that hundreds of children who died inside a former church residence for children born out of wedlock were buried in unmarked graves at the site. A researcher found records showing that 796 children, mostly infants, died at the home in Tuam, County Galway, from its 1925 opening to its 1962 closure. Local residents suspect they were interred in a nearby field, including in a disused septic tank. Martin said Ireland should investigate why so many children died in several long-closed homes for unwed mothers and how they were buried. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, file)

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Divernan

(15,480 posts)
2. Many of those young mothers are still alive; heart-breaking news to them.
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 05:16 AM
Jun 2014

Not just the mothers whose babies died, but every young woman whose baby was taken from her/surrendered by her under pressure at one of these institutions, will suffer such agony upon learning this. My understanding is that birth mothers were never given follow up information on whether or not their babies were adopted.

Speaking as a former Catholic, who received 16 years of religious education from grade school through Jesuit university undergraduate years, the most shocking part of that report is that the babies were never baptized. The teaching, at least in the U.S. church, at the time these Irish institutions were operating, was that infants were to be baptized around a month after birth, UNLESS they were at risk of dying, in which case they were immediately baptized, because otherwise they would be denied heaven - it was either off to the fiery pits of hell for them or at best being in perpetual limbo. It wasn't until 2007 that Pope Benedict revised that teaching, so for the nuns operating these "homes" to deny baptism? Absolutely horrifying. Back in the 1940's & '50's the nuns teaching me were collecting pennies from school children to send to "foreign missions" to rescue pagan babies by having them baptized. We got to pick whether we wanted to rescue a girl baby or boy baby, and even pick names. $5 worth of pennies would buy eternal salvation. And the ultimate irony - those pagan babies were not born in "Christian wedlock" either.


Vatican revises limbo view, hope for unbaptized babies
Updated 4/22/2007 1:47 PM

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI has reversed centuries of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on limbo, approving a Vatican report released Friday that says there were "serious" grounds to hope that children who die without being baptized can go to heaven.

Theologians said the move was highly significant — both for what it says about Benedict's willingness to buck a long-standing tenet of Catholic belief and for what it means theologically about the Church's views on heaven, hell and original sin — the sin that the faithful believe all children are born with.

Although Catholics have long believed that children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, the Church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians, however, have long taught that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace," said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Gormy Cuss

(30,884 posts)
4. They apparently didn't have food either
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 04:09 PM
Jun 2014

or priests to perform the rites of their faith, nor gravediggers to bury the bodies.

 

gerogie2

(450 posts)
5. They did bury the bodies.
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 05:22 PM
Jun 2014

No, None of them were put in a septic tank. That is a lie put out by the tabloid press.

Gormy Cuss

(30,884 posts)
6. In a mass, unmarked grave without the rite of Christian burial
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 05:52 PM
Jun 2014

and frankly, it hardly matters if it was in a septic tank or just an anonymous hole in the ground. There were so many ways these children were failed by the Church.

And BTW, the BBC reported the septic tank. Are you calling them a tabloid?

 

gerogie2

(450 posts)
7. If the shoe fits then the BBC should wear it
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 10:25 PM
Jun 2014

You're just repeating tabloid lies about not having a burial. 22 children died a month from disease over about forty years. Sorry but they didn't have vaccines or anti-biotics until well into the fifties.

Gormy Cuss

(30,884 posts)
8. No, I was repeating what the BBC reported.
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 10:51 PM
Jun 2014

You're categorizing it as lies and minimizing the issue by talking about infant mortality rates before vaccines were common while ignoring that these children may not have been baptized nor accorded a Christian burial even though they were in the care of Roman Catholic nuns in a Roman Catholic institution in a Roman Catholic country.

ucrdem

(15,512 posts)
13. I think it was 22 death per year or 1.8 per month on average:
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:05 AM
Jun 2014

Using the IT figures I get 796 deaths / 36 years /12 months per year = an average of 1.84 deaths per month. Tragic, but under the circumstances not surprising and certainly not criminal. The nature of the burials has according to Corless been "widely misrepresnted" per IT:

Even if a number of children are indeed interred in what was once a sewage tank, horrific as that thought is, there cannot be 796 of them. The public water scheme came to Tuam in 1937. Between 1925, when the home opened, and 1937 the tank remained in use. During that period 204 children died at the home. Corless admits that it now seems impossible to her that more than 200 bodies could have been put in a working sewage tank.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393?page=3


Regarding the Guardian, BBC, and the rest of the UK press, it's not exactly surprising that another Irish horror tale getting international headlines turns out on examination to be "misrepresented." Yes, the shoe fits, and naturally gets 200 recs in LBN and GD.

CBHagman

(16,968 posts)
9. A Q-and-A about the Tuam case.
Mon Jun 9, 2014, 11:23 PM
Jun 2014

Note that Catherine Corless, who did the story for a local paper last fall, actually looked at the death certificates. Bear in mind that the deceased children were not all infants but some in fact were elementary school age. The headlines have obscured what's known and what isn't.

That said, there were high mortality rates at the home.

[url]http://www.thejournal.ie/explainer-tuam-babies-1502773-Jun2014/[/url]

On edit: RTE interview with Catherine Corless. Note the community's response and the researcher's outreach here.

[url]http://www.rte.ie/news/player/2014/0606/20592921-interview-with-local-historian-catherine-corless/[/url]

Irish Times recap clarifying some of the details:

[url]http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393[/url]


hedgehog

(36,286 posts)
10. Thank you for that clarifying information -
Tue Jun 10, 2014, 08:13 AM
Jun 2014

What I glean from it is that possibly some children may have been buried in shallow graves over the top the old septic tank. (For those of you who don't know, a septic tank is basically a hallow concrete box)

The children's births and deaths were recorded, so there was no cover-up involved. What is causing the scandal is that the children were buried in unmarked graves with no record of who was buried where, and apparently without any funeral rites.

hack89

(39,171 posts)
15. "Why That Story About Irish Babies "Dumped In A Septic Tank" Is A Hoax"
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 01:00 PM
Jun 2014
Although the media attributed the “dumped in a septic tank” allegation to Catherine Corless, a local amateur historian, she denies making it. Her attempt to correct the record was reported by the Irish Times newspaper on Saturday (see here) but has been almost entirely ignored by the same global media that so gleefully recycled the original suggestion. That suggestion, which seems to have first surfaced in the Mail on Sunday, a London-based newspaper, reflected appallingly on the Sisters of Bon Secours, the order of Catholic nuns at the center of the scandal.

Today the Irish Times has published a reader’s letter that has further undercut the story. Finbar McCormick, a professor of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, sharply admonished the media for describing the children’s last resting place as a septic tank. He added: “The structure as described is much more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many part of Europe.

“In the 19th century, deep brick-lined shafts were constructed and covered with a large slab which often doubled as a flatly laid headstone. These were common in 19th-century urban cemeteries…..Such tombs are still used extensively in Mediterranean countries. I recently saw such structures being constructed in a churchyard in Croatia. The shaft was made of concrete blocks, plastered internally and roofed with large concrete slabs. Many maternity hospitals in Ireland had a communal burial place for stillborn children or those who died soon after birth. These were sometimes in a nearby graveyard but more often in a special area within the grounds of the hospital.”

So what are we left with? One fact seems beyond dispute: conditions in Irish orphanages up to the 1960s, if not later, were positively Dickensian. Certainly the death rate at many was shockingly high. But how should blame be apportioned? A major part of the problem would appear to have been the pervasive poverty of the time (the institution at the center of the scandal operated from the 1920s through the early 1960s). Because they were so desperately underfunded, Irish orphanages were disgracefully overcrowded, which meant that when one baby caught an infection, they all caught it. Not the least of the hazards was tuberculosis, a then incurable disease that spread like wildfire in overcrowded conditions.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/06/09/that-story-about-irish-babies-in-a-septic-tank-is-a-media-hoax/
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