Posted on 06/03/2014 10:14:36 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.
Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”
The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Seems as vicious as anything the primitive muslims do.
This is such a horror that it transcends sectarian bickering, but please recall that the Calvinists were WHY the Irish were in such destitution. To them, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” made lots of sense, because God hated them anyway.
Or did you forget that the potato famine was caused by the fact that the Irish had to rely on root vegetables because their Calvinist oppressors would burn everything that grew above ground? It’s not natural to be a one-crop people, but the Irish had only one crop they could survive on.
There’s no naivety in pointing out the obvious fallacy in your obnoxious comment.
22 deaths a year. I do not know how many children were born or living there.
Articles states that 2 a week died. Not true according to these stats.
“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?
Deal with it.
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. These girls were simply given over to reprobation and were obviously merely fulfilling the will of God.
Perhaps some folks here are under the delusion these Romanists had free will or something?
*cough cough*
You’re not worth the time, little man.
Whatever.
Go take the side of baby murderers.
So much of Ireland’s history is such a sad tale....
Wow..
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.
They were Calvinist oppressors by chance. By purpose they were the royal houses of Great Britain, who sought to end any chance of a Royal Irish challenge to their claims of total authority - as well as their claims of rightful authority.
Largely true. I emphasized their Calvinism chiefly to refute the notion that evil belongs to one denomination or another. Although I find the notion that Calvinism has that Catholics are not Christians, and non-Christians deserve whatever terrible things happen to them tends to lead to many horrible forms of self-justification.
Go look under the Vatican, then report back.
>> So this is the Christian alternative to abortion.
Existence is intrinsically evil — the Atheist provides no alternative.
Yes, it’s no secret that under RC abbeys and churches and the Vatican are many remains of keeping the ruse of the celibacy of the priests and nuns. They just buried the evidence.
The butter box babies of Nova Scotia: http://www.canadiancrc.com/Butterbox_babies.aspx
There is no depths to which the depraved human mind will not dig. On that, Calvin was correct!
Ignore facts like:
(1) Ireland, especially western Ireland, was grindingly poor from 1925-1961. Very few Irish were "well-nourished" by modern standards in those years.
(2) Infant mortality and childhood diseases were higher and more devastating now that they were then. There were no antibiotics. There was diphtheria, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever, and influenza, and whooping cough.
(3) Tuam was a rural area without electricity, modern plumbing, good roads, or modern health facilities.
(4) These children were abandoned by their families and raised in an understaffed orphanage for all intents and purposes.
Yet the reaction of people on this thread is: "Yo, why couldn't one of the sisters just pick up her iPhone and call the free clinic? All she needed to do was Uber an ambulance! And she should have gotten of FreshDirect and had some of those superhealthy Michelle Obama meals delivered!"
My great aunt grew up in Connaught in the 1930s. It was a third world country.
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