"Irish church under fire over children’s mass grave" by Terrence McCoy | Washington Post June 04, 2014
WASHINGTON — In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a 6-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 had been a mystery. A batch of never-before-released documents now contends their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank in the back of the home 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 the 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.’’
According to documents Corless provided The Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis, and pneumonia. Infant mortality at The Home was staggeringly high.
‘‘If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],’’ Corless said. ‘‘Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?’’
In keeping with Catholic teaching, such out-of-wedlock children were denied baptism and, if they died at such facilities, Christian burial.
It is well documented that throughout Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, church-run orphanages and workhouses often buried their dead in unmarked graves and unconsecrated ground.
I suppose the Popes will have to be answering for this.
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others.
Corless said she first started investigating The Home, which most locals wanted to forget, when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been The Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there?
So she requested the records through the local registration house. The attendant “said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children,’’ Corless said.
Corless said that in 1995, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath cracked concrete. ‘‘The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.’’
Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be higher than 800.
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Related(?):
"I HAVE TO post this again.
It is the single most riveting piece of news I've run across in a long
while How can this possibly be being blacked out on the catamite media?
It has to break through at some point and when it does? Holy shit (pun
intended)! What does this tell us about the majority of those at the top
of the tier in politics, religion and entertainment? We know Lord
Mandelson is deep into this kind of thing and obviously Jimmy Saville
was highly placed. Here's the thing, you got the high profile players
like The Popes, the business leaders, the politicians and entertainers
and then... then you got the highly disciplined black magicians that are
the minders for each and everyone of them. In some cases these are
visible entities and maybe we ought to pay more attention to the social
gatherings of these twits and who attends. In some cases the entities
are invisible and have been precipitating evil outward into the manifest
for a good long while, in some cases centuries. When you go traveling
about in the invisible realms, everything comes down to personal
motivations and intentions. This very quickly attracts to you those
whose job descriptions fit with what you are after, regardless of
whether you know what that is. they certainly do. Before I continue to
the concluding thoughts, which is why I went into this---
--MORE--"
He has some points considering the absolute depravity issuing forth from certain $ectors these days.
Also see: Former Irish bank chief awaits fate in bankruptcy case
Still waiting for them the Drumm out a decision.
Judge won’t unseal records in Belfast Project case
Related: Britain Declares War on Ireland
All of a sudden that doesn't seem very important.
"Lauren Astley never got the chance to go to college. On July 3, 2011, about a month after she graduated from Wayland High School, she was killed by her former boyfriend, who was still enraged that she had broken up with him in the spring.
Memories of Lauren, frozen at 18....
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Also see: Fujita Found Guilty
