Stillborn?
So this is the Christian alternative to abortion. Hm. Can’t say it looks like much of an improvement.
Nope, never happened, Catholic bashing, NANANANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU NANANANANANAN
IBTUCOCCASTS!
I would like to hear from children from “the Home” and clergy who worked there before I pass judgement. Infant and childhood mortality was quite high during this time, so 800 dead over many decades does not seem so over the top. As most orphanages are underfunded, especially during the Great Depression and War, they may have simply not had the resources for coffins.
Nothing new:
She swore by grass, she swore by corn
Her true love had never been born
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o
He said to her you’re swearing wrong
Six fine children you’ve had born
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o
If you be a man of noble fame
You’ll tell to me the father of them
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o
There’s one of them by your brother John
At the well below the valley-o
One of them by your Uncle Don
At the well below the valley-o
Two of them by your father dear
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o
If you be a man of noble fame
You’ll tell to me what did happen to them
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o
There’s one of them buried beneath the tree
At the well below the valley-o
Another two buried beneath the stone
At the well below the valley-o
Two of them outside the graveyard wall
At the well below the valley-o
Green grows the lily-o
Right among the bushes-o....
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.
So much of Ireland’s history is such a sad tale....
Wow..
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!
This is SO SAD! Humans are capable of such evil!
If there's anyone still alive responsible for this atrocity, they ought to be brought to trial.
A disgusting stain on my Irish heritage. A clear example of religious zealotry turning people evil.
This seems to be recycled every so often. Never heard the Church’s side from up to some 90 years ago.
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.
It wasn’t until after WWII that the BCG vaccine against TB first became available in the most advanced medical centers—-- and it was years later in impoverished western Ireland.
In this era, even for privileged TB patients who got the best of food in the most pristine and costly alpine TB sanatoria, 50% of patients were dead within five years.
Antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin, Aureomycin, and tetracycline were not available for prescription until the 1950′s. Before this time, 60-80% of the people infected with pneumonia died, usually within a week-10 days. (It was only with the introduction of penicillin that the mortality rate for pneumonia dropped to 1 -5%).
American Medicine Volume 2, p. 290, estimates that in the pre-antibiotic era, one seventh (1/7) of all deaths worldwide were caused by tuberculosis. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran many articles on the serious requirement that TB sufferers be kept apart from the uninfected population, and that their bodies be disposed of as soon as possible after death in order to prevent recurring epidemics.
Church-run charitable facilities were precisely the places to which these unfortunate sick children were being consigned. Is it any wonder that the death rate was high, and the burial of bodies done quickly without individual caskets and graves?
Thousands of babies and children passed through institutions like the Bon Secours Home. Indeed many were brought there because their parents knew that was the only place they could receive even basic palliative care without infecting everyone in their family households.
So people in Ireland whose little children were desperately ill — and who had no means of treating them — left them at churches, convents and orphanages, thus continuously re-introducing infectious diseases into Homes caring for orphaned/abandoned children.
Many such institutions attempted to protect the healthy babies born in the Homes, by arranging for their adoption as quickly as they could. Thus the next “scandal” charged against Catholic charitable organizations: the awful, heartless adoption of Irish babies by American families (Philomena!) .
Evidence suggests the conclusion that Bon Secours and similar Homes were not barbaric negligent pest-houses, but baby-saving missions, doing heart-breaking but heroic work in a time of desperation.
In any case, the causes of death listed in the story are taken from the files of a "local health board," and yet there is no indication whatsoever that the orphanage was cited for any kind of violations. That should tell any reasonable reader that the children likely entered the facility in a state of “neglect and malnourishment.” That some of them were not saved in a cramped institution wherein many of the children suffered with communicable diseases is no surprise.
The surprise is that so many thousands survived.