Looks like a cousins birthday party in my Gramma's basement in the 50s.
Ireland: Historian refutes ‘septic tank’ story ... http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=24911
The children in those pictures don’t appear malnourished.
Not sure if this is related but there was a movie called “sisters of Magdalene” i think, about these nuns in Ireland raising orphan girls... it was horrific!!
Albion Wilde said, on another thread:
I am not defending any misconduct. But I am disappointed some freepers’ open eagerness to believe the rank inaccuracy and sensationalism of the reporting, in light of the anti-Christian and anti-Catholic agenda and propaganda sweeping Western nations supported and funded by Marxists, from the One World financiers to the UN to the Islamists.
Let’s take a look at how hysterically misleading this “800 babies in a septic tank” headline is. As two earlier posts have indicated:
• There has not even been an establishment of fact that the container was a septic tank, and
• the historian on whose work this story was based said she did not characterize the container as a septic tank,
• nor did she report on any 800 remains in such a tank.
• What she did was research public records on paper of 800 child deaths at the home from various causes, over a period of many decades.
• The actual burial places of approximately 775 of those children had not been determined as of the above article, due to a lack of funding.
• There is no evidence whether Catholic rites were or were not performed.
• The eyewitnesses who discovered the container in 1975 said they saw, at most, 20 small skulls.
• The remains could have been children, could have been miscarried fetuses, could have been from the 20th century or could have been from the Potato Famine era.
Since so few forensic determinations have yet been made, the headline is obviously intended to stir up hatred and disgust, and it has worked among quite a number of freepers.
Well, at least they dropped the septic tank bit.
Seems this hateful rubbish is still making its rounds on FR.
Are we taking into account the general health of infants at this era in time? Infant mortality was once very high. We take the reverse for granted.
Put me down as having high suspicion that this is a catholic-bashing enterprise.
Looks like a cousins birthday party in my Gramma's basement in the 50s.
I saw on another site that this story was totally bogus
The Sisters managed a better than 80% survival rate in their Home, when we know historically that orphanages and foundling homes even in the USA during the pre-antibiotic era could have the horrifyingly opposite result: an 80% death rate. This is not because of abuse or neglect, but the simple fact of life and death when populations were ravaged by infectious childhood diseases.
The best medical advice of the time was that the remains of children who succumbed to these diseases should be buried as soon as possible to prevent the spread of the infection. Hence their interment in vertical shaft graves or crypts, which were common in public institutions throughout the region. The Sisters concentrated their resources on food, soap and clothing for the living, not on caskets, headstones or individual graves for those who died.
It is crazy that the people now being blamed, trashed and libeled for these children's tragic deaths are in fact the dedicated care-giving women who were the only ones who labored to save them.
(From the McAleese Report, Chapter 19, which describes living and work conditions:)i. Sexual abuse
32. No other women in contact with the Committee made any allegation of sexual abuse during their time in the Magdalen Laundries. However a significant number told the Committee that they had suffered sexual abuse in the family home or in other institutions, either before or after their time in the Magdalen Laundries.
ii. Physical abuse
33. A large majority of the women who shared their stories with the Committee said that they had neither experienced nor seen other girls or women suffer physical abuse in the Magdalen Laundries.34. In this regard, women who had in their earlier lives been in an industrial or reformatory school drew a clear distinction between their experiences there and in the Magdalen Laundries, stating clearly that the widespread brutality which they had witnessed and been subjected to in industrial and reformatory schools was not a feature of the Magdalen Laundries. "
And from Spiked Magazine's Brendan O'Neill (who is unconnected with the Catholic Church: an atheist, in fact):
"For the thorough, 1,000-page study found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched."