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 ...
I am Catholic by conversion and mostly English in ancestry, without a drop of Irish blood.
One of the most shocking places I have ever visited is the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin - in my ignorance I thought it was the Catholic cathedral until I was charged admission, and saw all the triumphalist and martial tributes to the conquerors of the Irish and Papistry.
Why did the Irish live in filthy and deplorable conditions, and count themselves fortunate if they had a pig to bring inside a one-room hut? Well, if a man made improvements on the land he rented, a bigger house, better drainage and so forth, he would not receive any compensation for those improvements from the landowner, were he evicted - and those very improvements could well be the incentive to evict him and his family in order to receive a higher rent.
Ireland exported food during the famine - wheat, sheep, beef. The starving were kept from that food at gunpoint. I think that genocide would be an accurate word.
When we were in Kerry and Cork I thought the people warm and happy - the famine 150 years behind them. But in the North, still in the Catholic towns, there was a sharpness and a bitterness to them, the strife there far more recent.
I can’t think of a single monastery where that happened. As for the Vatican, I’ve not heard of any such archaeological finds. It was built on a pagan burial ground, might that be what you are thinking of?
I’ve had the distinct pleasure to know monks and nuns. They are by and large great people and very devoted to the Lord. Not saying stuff like that never ever happened—the devil works on people in monasteries just like he works on all of us. But “dang near any” monastery no way.
"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."
Don't you get it? We have proof of the mistreatment of the dead, which I find most disturbing because it suggests mistreatment of the living.
It's a distinction which should be obvious to anyone without a blinding agenda.
All brought to you by Catholic zealots.Right... there it is.
Actually, underneath the Vatican there was discovered in the 1960s a veritable necropolis (city of the dead), but its meaning is almost the opposite of Bulwyf’s insinuation.
See, contrary to the deceitful testimony of Martin Luther, the Vatican City isn’t in what was traditionally Rome Proper. (When Rome was expanded into Greater Rome, it finally engulfed the Vatican City.) The Vatican was built in exile, on the far side of the Tiber from Babylon (which makes the notion of crossing the Tiber very funny). Catholic legend had always said that when Peter was crucified, as a sign of disrespect, his bones were dumped outside the city limits. From that day on, the Bishops of Rome have lived in exile from Rome, and their home was built on the very boneyard of St. Peter. And then another was built on top of that. And then another was built on top of that, until the boneyard of St. Peter faded into mere legend.
But in the 1960s, while digging beneath St. Peter’s, archaeologists went through an opening they had discovered, and found the boneyard: an elaborate maze created to separate the various bodies. Directly under St. Peter’s, they found a tomb labelled, “Here lies Peter.”
I know lots of good nuns and priests too, I was referring to history when there was a great deal of effort to keep the appearances up. It was pretty widespread. My Norwegian grandmother spoke of it, and other people that would never consider spreading false testimony. It was known in the early 1930s. My wife’s dad, he’s anti christian because he knows of this stuff, and assumes we’re all the same.
I just assumed everyone knew of this. I’ll have to find some links or something for folks then.
>> But in the North, still in the Catholic towns, there was a sharpness and a bitterness to them
How far North, British territory?
That’s the first I have heard of that story. I don’t know about all that stuff. I do know that revelation alludes to the RC church as being the one world religion etc. Revelation talks about a beast, a dragon one could say. I do know that Jesus comes again, and evil is defeated. The good guys win.
It seems we’re in very interesting times. Jesus says the way is narrow. Non conformity to the majority of people would seem like a good character trait heh.
My family is Catholic. But I can still call out awful behavior. Same goes for Protestants, Jews, and Muzzies.
My parents grew up in Italy so I know the clericalism of which you speak.
However bad it got though, I don’t think in most places it was so depraved as to be burying masses of illegitimate infants beneath the floorboards. Especially since cloistered monastics were behind an iron grill and had busy, busy days of work and prayer and didn’t have a great deal of opportunity or time for those kinds of shenanigans.
If you find something I’ll be happy to look at it though.
Well I offer this. I may be the only one commenting here that was actually in a orphanage. It was 1940 in NYC with a younger brother and sister after both parents died. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to us. The priests, nuns and prefects were outstanding and caring. I knew of no sexual happenings. Yes there were very young children there too. I went to a NYC school and my job was cleaning cows at our dairy because we had no pasteurizing equipment. Thank God there were places like that. They could use them today.
I agree with your post that Ireland was grindingly, hopelessly poor at that time and infant mortality was high for legitimate children as well as “illegitimate.” Even here in this country, two of my rural great-grandmothers each had many pregnancies and at least half of their children died — the Protestant one had eight and four died; the Catholic one had 16 and only 6 survived, with the youngest being raised by the eldest because she died giving birth to to last baby. Those were not unusual circumstances.
So you think Islam will scoop up Rome, not the other way around?
Quite a debate here and at the originating web site.
At the risk of being burned at the stake... 800 dead babies (bodies) may have been disposed of in this way by a single lazy person (grounds caretaker) who found an easy way to get his work done. Over a 20 year period (3.33 per week, it could have occurred unbeknownst to the nuns at the time. Anyone (almost) exposed to this type of constant flow of death eventually looks at the “body” as a shell of the past and not a holy vessel housing the soul. The soul is no longer in the body but in heaven, the body is nothing more than ashes to ashes. This could easily explain how this happened and it is no more a blight on Catholicism or Christianity than any other mass grave yet to be discovered in the forests of Europe or anywhere else in the world.
Murder through neglect or otherwise is NEVER a Christian value.
Knock it off with the sobriety.
Christianity has its dark days, as anything good tends towards perversion at some point. If you look throughout its history there were “corrections’ every once in a while, much needed ones at that. But God always keeps a faithful remnant that is able to keep alive the Truth, God’s Love and The Way. I believe that God will judge those who perpetrated these wrongs. In every church and every church generation, there are the true believers, who would never commit such acts, and there are those who profess, but they were no more than “born into a Christian family” and never laid down their own lives to God’s true calling. They cannot truly offer God’s love, only a poor imitation of it.
This is not a reason to give up hope or to condemn. We all have hearts that are bent towards wickedness, and if you don’t believe that, Jeremiah 17:9 states it. Besides, we all make some comments on this site that are far from Christian. We only need to examine ourselves to see that we, but for the grace of God, could have been right there in those same circumstances and doing the same thing.
Yes. Me too: not Catholic and skeptical about blatant attacks.
Thanks.
I think there will be a fight between good and evil until the last day before Jesus returns. I do not believe in a rapture. I think the tares will grow amongst the wheat and the wheat will have to put up with the tribulations of it until the trumpet sounds.
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