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 ...
Stillborn?
No. Read the article. Deprived diet and poor health practices.
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!
Fixed it for ya.
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.
We recently watched the movie, Philomena, performed by Judy Dench.
It’s like watching a documentary, seriously done, and profoundly moving. The theatre was very quiet as people left.
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....
Acts of individuals do not define doctrine.
Don’t be such a clod.
BTW. You could use a new nic after your last comment.
Some might think that if a coffin can't be afforded, there are other options than throwing the body into a septic tank. Maybe not, though.
LOL
What did you think the Christian alternative to abortion was yesterday, before this bizarre and shocking and rare story from Europe?
The infant death rate in Ireland in the 30s was well over 20%. Given a troubled population, I woudn’t be surprised that in a well-run orphanage, it wasn’t far more than that. And Ireland was hardly exceptional. You’ll note that the estimate was not gotten through sorting through the bones, but by contacting the local authorities. You’ll also note most of these children were eventually adopted.
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.
Your laughing in such a context is duly noted.
Don’t be naive.
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