“I do blame the Catholic Church,” says Corless. “I blame the families as well but people were afraid of the parish priest. I think they were brainwashed. I suppose the lesson is not to be hiding things. To face up to reality.
“My fear is that if things aren’t faced now it’s very easy to slide back into this kind of cover-up again. I want the truth out there. If you give people too much power it’s dangerous.”
Living and dying in a culture of shame and silence for decades, the Home Babies’ very existence was considered an affront to Ireland and God.
It was a different time, some defenders argued this week, omitting to mention that the stigmatizing silence that surrounded The Home was fostered by clerics. Indeed the religious orders were so successful at silencing their critics that for decades even to speak of The Home was to risk contagion.
And now that terrifying era of shame and silence is finally lifting, we are left to ask what all their lonesome suffering was in aid of, and what did it actually achieve?
To donate to the memorial for the mothers and babies of The Home, contact Catherine Corless at catherinecorless@hotmail.com.
The quote, above, is from article. Is this the consequence of eating too many potatoes?
First, before I get accused of shifting blame, let me reiterate my first post, written before I read the Calvinist bilge:
“As a Catholic, the sickening thing to me was the disposal of the bodies: the poor treatment of the bodies despite Catholic beliefs makes it very easy to believe that their souls weren’t cared for while they were alive.”
But to answer your question:
Yes, actually, as a matter of fact, spending years eating only potatoes interspersed with nearly starving to death repeatedly does things to completely mess up your mind. Ireland is bonkers, less so than a few generations ago, but the spiritual and social damage done by the extreme poverty and oppression takes many generations to undo.
You think the shame and silence of Ireland comes from the Catholic Church? You haven’t been to Italy. It comes from not knowing what to say when you figure out that Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary probably ate Cousin Andrew because they had been driven mad with hunger... and yet you can’t really judge them because you know damned well the fact that Dad fed you well has more than a little to do with other people in your extended family dying.
And when you have priests listening to confessions like, “I murdered my little brother. I couldn’t control myself: I hate a whole potato; I had no idea he had a fever” you get a little bit of a thick skin to calling things evil. And thus, as the bible teaches, evil is handed down from generation unto generation.