The news from Ireland. I am speechless. Actually, no I'm not. Apparently, from what I've read in various articles, the Archdiocese's plan going forward is to put a memorial on the site. And that's it. The order of nuns responsible have chipped in 'a small sum' to help pay for it. How nice. Never mind how disrespectful it is for the institution responsible to pray over their bodies; and never mind, given the purpose of the home and the circumstances of women's indentured servitude there, how ironic and insulting it is to decide to put a statue of the virgin Mary over their children's bodies. Never mind all that. The idea that those in authority actually think the right thing to do here is to put a new slab of concrete over the top and move on just beggars belief.
The order of Nuns still exists? This is a criminal investigation. SWAT raid every property, drive them into the streets and seal the properties for investigation. Tear the places down like Gacys house. Confiscate every asset which can be located and leave the remaining nuns to their own devices. Im sure the Pope will take them in. Treat them, and every other Church property just like Henry VIII would have. This is a chance to drive those snakes out of Ireland once and for all.
The home in question does not; it's a neighborhood now (and I'm sure some of the inhabitants are really happy to discover they bought a house and moved in next to an unmarked mass grave). But the order does -- they're international. They have facilities in the U.S. too.
As I posted on this subject in the Pope thread, it isn't clear to me that there is anything wrong here? This facility operated for 36 or 37 years in a context in which stillbirths and infant mortality were exceptionally high compared to our standards. Without knowing how many pregnancies they actually handled, it is a little unreasonable to assume that there was anything unusual for the time and place. As for the septic tank, what were they supposed to use? They weren't allowed to bury the children in consecrated ground, and they obviously needed something that could handle a substantial volume with a degree of "quarantine" to it. . It isn't as though they were flushing bodies down a toilet-- if I understand the story correctly they simply adapted an unused tank, which would seem about as safe for the purpose as anything available to them.
And as replied to over there, your numbers are way off. In other reporting, it has been asserted based on demographic research that the child mortality in the home was between 4-5 times higher than the general population over that time period. There's no doubt that many of the unwed mothers and their children came into the homes in states of poverty; that malnourishment and disease grew worse while there, secondary to systematic abuse of the children in homes like this one, is apparently established fact in Ireland, something that no one seriously questions. The ground, with markers. (emphasis mine) That this seems sensible to you is . . . sorry, now I am speechless.
Unwed women were locked against their will in a prison for the crime of having sex. That's for starters what's "wrong here." Children were maltreated, malnourished, and abused. That's also a minor detail you're overlooking. The facility WAS the "context". The "time and place" was, again, a prison for the punishment of young women and their children for the crime of procreation outside of marriage. So they used the power of Church & State to lock these children up, mistreated them, and now we're supposed to clap our hands that they followed their own protocol regarding disposing of these unworthy souls? And in what sense is dumping a human body in a septic tank fundamentally different from "flushing bodies down the toilet"?
Sensible, no. Part of the context of the times, yes. Was Pearl Harbor sensible from either side's point of view? The trial of Jackie Robinson? You are condemning the whole church for something that happened in localized circumstances over half a century ago, part of it almost a full century ago. I can find plenty to criticize in them today without literally digging up skeletons from 1961 and before.
I think you're conflating my posts with someone else's. I haven't said a thing about the Church as a whole. That said, I do condemn the Archdiocese there now for their decision as to what the appropriate response now is.
On an early copy of the Home's map of its facilities, the septic tank is identified as a septic tank, and not as a swimming pool.
Ever seen one used to hide the bodies of 800 babies you were supposed to be caring for? And nothing in the reporting suggests that this septic tank was installed separately just for the disposal of dead babies (which, actually, would have been pretty horrifying). It's identified as THE septic tank. So no.
Two other points. Being a half-century old, atrocities like this ending only a half-century ago doesn't seem that long ago to me. It certainly doesn't seem like something so far into the mists of history as to ignore. The reports in the Irish press include interviews with folks who speak candidly about direct knowledge of the treatment of children there. Also, there must be some kind of limits to the argument that "the context of the times" must be considered when judging this sort of thing. Or can we explain away Adana and Kristallnacht similarly?
Apologies-- I was thinking of another's post--Hertha's, I think. As regards Krystallnacht etc, it depends-- the nuns appear to me to have been making what effort they could to address a social problem under difficult circumstances, not exploit one, and be entitled to some slack on that account. The SS, not so much, although some of them undoubtedly believed their own BS. However I'm arguing on unsolid numbers about an issue I care little about, certainly not enough to want to listen to a radio segment on it. I'll back off pending some real numbers.
The last time I was over, I visited the graveyard of the Letterfrack Industrial school. It's near where my grandfather was from. There's a stone there that reads: The excuse of "it was the time and place" rings very hollow to me.
Yes, they were "addressing a social problem" -- with the position that the unwed mothers and children who came to the Home were sinners that required punishment. The women were guilty of serious sin for sex out of wedlock, even if it came in the form of rape; and the children were sinners for being born from such circumstances. So the women got indentured servitude, and the children got systemic abuse. And that's not speculation -- there are people alive today who observed it and can speak of it, and have.
Anyone who attended Catholic school knows that there were some vicious, nasty nuns. Treating unwed pregnant women & their children poorly were deliberate actions, as were the dispositions of corpses of fetuses & babies who died. At the same time, many nuns lived in harsh conditions themselves, often as part of an ascetic tradition. That doesn't excuse their mistreatment of others.
It gets even better http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Re...ildren-to-be-used-in-medical-experiments.html
Time to close every location in which these slut-prisons operated and take them apart a little at a time looking for evidence. Prosecute the Church as an entity for thousands of counts of kidnapping, false imprisonment, murder, corpse abuse and anything else which can be set before a jury. The fines should be astronomical, in the billions. Of course, the Vatican being a sovereign nation, it can be easily argued to declare war on the Holy See and take them down once and for all.
Without addressing the specifics of what you've written above, I'll just say that the chances of such a strong response happening in Ireland, which was effectively a theocracy until the early 90s, is pretty low. As the molestation scandals have shown, despite the level of centralization in dogma/policy, the administrative decentralization of the Church seems to insulate it from serious blowback over stuff like this. It's always the fault of that local branch of an order or of a parish. Rarely it reaches up to the level of the management of an order or a diocese. Never does anything reach to the Church as a whole.
I'm not aware of any autopsies, and I doubt any would be very enlightening after so many decades of decomposition. That said, it's no secret (and is documented by folks who observed it) how women and children were treated in the Home and other such facilities, and at the time treating the inhabitants that way wasn't really considered foul play in Ireland.
I'm just wondering if these kids were intentionally killed/murdered, or if they died of natural causes and they just used the septic tank to bury them in lieu of digging a grave.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the "less evil" of those two scenarios is what happened and the kids died of natural causes. It is still the worst kind of ********ery to just dump their bodies into a septic tank to avoid the inconvenience of digging a proper grave with a marker.
You'd think they'd have forced the mothers to dig the graves... you know, all that sluttery is how the children got here to begin with, right?