If this was a story about a Protestant home for unwed mothers, where the dead bodies of nearly a thousand babies and young children were unceremoniously dumped one on top of another in an old septic tank, covered over and unmarked, would you be saying the same thing?
Nobody is denying that there may have been legitimate reasons for the many deaths and that they were not a result of criminal neglect or murder. It is just the seemingly blatant lack of compassion for the innocent children who had nothing to do with HOW they were conceived and their heartbroken mothers who, often times, were forced to leave home and taken into such places. These women were often NOT immoral but victims of rape and they were indentured to work in these "homes" to pay off their costs of care. Their children, those that lived, were often SOLD to factories using child slave labor or, if they were lucky, to an infertile couple wanting a child. They were ostrasized just like their mothers from other children and society and treated as outcasts, with no hope for a normal life. That isn't what we expect from a church-sponsored ministry, is it?
Believe me, if the same kind of story came out about a "Protestant" ministry doing the same thing, I would be at the head of the line condemning it. I wouldn't be pointing the finger at those who revealed the story.
I understand your condemnations. But having been raised in an Irish-American family, I have learned over the decades to see the harsh emotional behavior of the past's ignorant Irish poor as a cultural phenomenon that did not result from Catholic theology, but became entwined with Irish institutional Catholicism, because few other kinds of people except the poor and ignorant were available in post-famine Ireland. Few of us on FR have ever lived in a culture of multi-generational grinding poverty and ignorance, punctuated only by the often baffling rituals and intervention of the England-persecuted RC church in Ireland.
While we would like to judge the past by today's standards, and foreign nations by American standards, it's not really fair to do so. As conservatives, we are often accused by the left in this country of having personally set out to give diseases to American Indians, to enjoy slavery instead of tolerating it with restrictions against a backdrop of fierce opposition that almost destroyed any hope of a Constitution, and to have whipped every slave rather than care for them as we would a good horse, given that an adult male slave cost $2000 in 1845 money. We are daily characterized as haters of homosexuals and women, of wanting to create a theocracy -- and if we did establish a Christian theocracy, it would be utterly indistinguishable from the intents and practices of the Taliban.
Surely you can see that while there are regrettable elements of truth in every shocking discovery of tragic events of the past, the whole truth lies in between what we think we would do today and what the propagandists are saying about the yesterday whose influences they are determinedly trying to eliminate.
As conservatives, we experience what it is like to be slimed by propaganda and to have hate directed at us and violence incited against us on a daily basis -- while the left accuses us of hating and inciting violence against them when we report facts instead of emotional polemics. I have counter-demonstrated at leftist anti-war rallies on the National Mall that left hundreds of thousands of pieces of litter behind on the grass and streets for the taxpayers to pick up; and I have partipated in many conservative events on the National Mall such as the first gigantic Tea Party rally in 2009 after which the only trash to be found was piled neatly around the very few trash cans provided, because the Tea Party was prejudged to be so potentially violent that the Park Service had removed most of the trashcans. They were convinced that small-government zealots in colonial costumes would pick up trashcans and use them to bash -- who or what, exactly? The police? The windows of the Capitol Building? Nothing could have been further from the truth.
What has always been true is that "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on in the morning." The rehashing of the worst possible interpretation of this tragic Tuam story is but the latest chapter in a worldwide campaign by leftist useful media idiots to carry water for the internationalist secular socialists who stand to profit from taking the hope of Christ away from the people. Magnifying the horror and minimizing any mitigating elements of any Christian scandal serves their purposes -- the more rabidly emotional, the better.
Not every human error born of poverty and desperation such as Tuam is as intentional or horrific as the highly profitable Gosnells, illegal-worker traffickers, "educational" pornographers and sex-slavers of today who go unremarked.
None of us were there.