Culture of life, my ass. More like a culture of Catholic hypocrisy.
A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.
Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said.
The commission said analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.
Let’s not even consider those unmarried mothers, locked away in isolation and virtual slavery.
If all those people complaining about Planned Parenthood wanted to do what’s right, they’d move their picketlines to the nearest Catholic church.
Force them to watch “the Magdeline Sisters”.
But, but – surely each one of those hundreds of little corpses got a sprinkle of magic water and magic words!
“Bon Secours”: Good Succor? Good Rescue? Seems rather a misnomer.
dreamstone #1:
Or skip the dramatised version and listen to the actual survivors.
Beautiful, powerful song by Joni Mitchell: The Magdalene Laundaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DoAlothonQ
Pierce@2: In a similar case I read about a few years ago the dead infants had not been babtized, as being born out of wedlock they did not deserve it or something.
As it’s also rather important in the Catholic tradition that a body is buried in consecrated ground, I suspect the victims were given as much “spiritual” as real care. Doesn’t make much difference to us but for a faithfull Catholic it would add another layer of cruelty, I think.
Up to three years old…
There’s a brief interview clip up at the BBC with a woman whose mother was “sentenced” to Tuam. She’d become pregnant after being assaulted. Catholic kindness being what it is, mother and child were separated – the mother was sent elsewhere. When the six-month old baby died the mother was told, “The child of your sin is dead.”
The interviewee also added someone was “thrown out onto the road the same day”, but I can’t tell if this was referring to the mother or the dead child. I certainly wouldn’t put either past the people running places like Tuam. Although judging by the very Christian mass grave it was probably the mother, catholic kindness being what it is.
Apparently abortion is OK after the 3rd year.
@dreamstone, #1
You mean the nun’s responsible? Why show the Catholic Sisters who ran a Magdalene Laundry a fairly sanitised movie about a Magdalene Laundry? I am sure that they are more familiar than anyone else with the details of the appalling cruelty and hardships they themselves willfully inflicted without respite upon other women. They saw the actual real people, not fictional portrayals, under their heels. They saw their tears and anguish, heard their desperate pleas for kindness and compassion, day after day after week after month after year and ignored it all. Because they truly believed that these women – including those who became pregnant following rape, as in a case recently highlighted by the BBC – were wicked and foul and not deserving of treatment above that given to farm animals, and their children were similarly stained by “sin”. In any case, most of those nun’s are dead by now. but its worth bearing in mind that many of them who are still alive think they should actually be thanked for their efforts in taking care of the single mothers and other women they imprisoned, not criticised as monsters.
One thing about the Guardian article in the OP which really pisses me off is the statement “…it has been alleged up to 800 died”. Fuck that wobbling nonsense. The deaths of 796 children inside that home between 1925 and 1961 are a matter of public record, not allegation. It was the work of one committed woman who brought those records out of government offices to public attention, and she was criticised as a troublemaker by Magdalene nuns and Catholic leaders. A major media outlet refusing to acknowledge the fact of the matter simply follows the Catholic narrative that this is all just a big exaggeration.
News coverage mentions “796 deaths, some of malnutrition”
Starving infants to death.
Well done, Catholic church, well done. They must be so proud of themselves.
@11 opposablethumbs
Worth mentioning that they are with billions. Everytime you see a Pope in Versace shoes, remember where that money DIDN’T go.
FTFY
Your lovely Bill Donohue was on the radio here in Ireland today at 14.20 local time on the national private talk station ( http://www.newstalk.com/Moncrieff ) explaining how the above story was fake news. He was basically arguing semantics as to what constitutes a mass grave. He may have been right about half of the 800 children buried in the mass grave but for the worst of reasons, It appears that now, about half the death certs were fake to cover illegal adoptions to the USA, quite a lucrative source of income for the order. One of the reasons that this case was being investigated and continues to be so, was that there was concern that some of the actors ie doctors and police, might still be working within the public service system. The host ended with the phrase “poor babba ” which means that Donohue was considered a petulant child who could not be engaged in rational argument. It was quite depressing to find out that Donohue holds an Irish passport so apologies from Ireland.
Another cache of dead babies from a Magdalene Asylum? Damn.
Note to others: This is not new. I’m pretty sure this has happened before, that there have been other found caches of dead babies from Magdalene Asylums.
That assumes none of the deaths were faked. As AI, for instance, has noted, there are suspicions of illegal adoption practices. What indisputably exists are 796 death certificates and many — but it not known how many — human remains.
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The author of The Catholic church is ‘shocked’ at the hundreds of children buried at Tuam. Really? is incandescent, for a reason: “Two members of my family were born in the Tuam home, lived short lives there, and are likely lying in that septic tank […]. Their mother died young, weakened from her time in the custody of the church. Because of this I understand that otherwise good, kind people in Ireland handed power over women and children’s lives to an institution they knew was abusive. And I wrestle with the reality that — in our schools and hospitals — we’re still handing power over women and children’s lives to the Catholic church. Perhaps, after Tuam, after everything, that’s what’s really shocking.”