mass grave of 800 infants found at Galway 'fallen women' home

[Johnny Canuck3]

People are hurting and feel very deeply about these 800 deaths and many others.

The question is: These children were in the care of the Church. Why would the Church not give dead children a proper Christian burial, ie, one child in one casket or shroud, in one grave?

How can the Church countenance or justify taking the bodies of dead children and throwing them into a pit or septic tank?

 

[weepiper]

The question is: These children were in the care of the Church. Why would the Church not give dead children a proper Christian burial, ie, one child in one casket or shroud, in one grave?

How can the Church countenance or justify taking the bodies of dead children and throwing them into a pit or septic tank?

Because they weren't baptised. Because the Church is fucked up.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I didn't realize a person had to be baptized in order to get a proper burial.

Fuck: I'm in trouble.

 

[Coolfonz]

If you ran a prison and someone died every ten days it would be called a concentration camp, or labour camp, or gulag...

 

[The Pale King]

If you ran a prison and someone died every ten days it would be called a concentration camp, or labour camp, or gulag...

Indeed. With the inmates being used as human subjects for medical experiments, the disposal in mass graves, the network of sites, and the inmates selected on the basis of their birth, the parallels to the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany are impossible to ignore. Which is why the absence of outrage or any seeming effort to bring the perpetrators to justice is particularly horrifying.

 

[Betsy]

The question is: These children were in the care of the Church. Why would the Church not give dead children a proper Christian burial, ie, one child in one casket or shroud, in one grave?

It is completely beyond me that not one person spoke out for those children. How could anyone know about it and let it happen when these children were in their care.

How can the Church countenance or justify taking the bodies of dead children and throwing them into a pit or septic tank?

Very simple - they can't!

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

The question is: These children were in the care of the Church. Why would the Church not give dead children a proper Christian burial, ie, one child in one casket or shroud, in one grave?

How can the Church countenance or justify taking the bodies of dead children and throwing them into a pit or septic tank?

The question also is how doctors signed off on death certs for so many of these babies and children, apparently without question.

 

[Buckaroo]

In the country, Catholic cemeteries often had an untended, walled off section for the non-baptized and the suicides. No headstones or flowers allowed. What's striking about this case given the Catholic church's obsession with pain and suffering is their failure to indulge the misery and capitalise on it like Mother Teresa did. Truth is there was no money it at the time. The state funded these institutions and silently applauded pragmatism in dealing with their victims. What to do with the bodies? Fuck 'em in the septic tank. Job done. Social cleansing by any other name. As for baptism, many if not most of these children would have been baptised, I think being given the last rites counts as a bus ticket to eternal purgatory at least, problem is not that they weren't baptised into the right religion but they weren't baptised into the right class. George Bernard Shaw claimed the professions were a conspiracy against the laity and in this case and others, the professional classes were all in it together. They had to be. Call me a loon-spud but blaming this atrocity on a few mad nuns and the church alone, now that's a conspiracy. Not that anyone here is doing that but that seems to be the gist of the media etc

 

[trashpony]

In the country, Catholic cemeteries often had an untended, walled off section for the non-baptized and the suicides. No headstones or flowers allowed. What's striking about this case given the Catholic church's obsession with pain and suffering is their failure to indulge the misery and capitalise on it like Mother Teresa did. Truth is there was no money it at the time. The state funded these institutions and silently applauded pragmatism in dealing with their victims. What to do with the bodies? Fuck 'em in the septic tank. Job done. Social cleansing by any other name. As for baptism, many if not most of these children would have been baptised, I think being given the last rites counts as a bus ticket to eternal purgatory at least, problem is not that they weren't baptised into the right religion but they weren't baptised into the right class. George Bernard Shaw claimed the professions were a conspiracy against the laity and in this case and others, the professional classes were all in it together. They had to be. Call me a loon-spud but blaming this atrocity on a few mad nuns and the church alone, now that's a conspiracy. Not that anyone here is doing that but that seems to be the gist of the media etc

They weren't. See my post upthread.

 

[Coolfonz]

Indeed. With the inmates being used as human subjects for medical experiments, the disposal in mass graves, the network of sites, and the inmates selected on the basis of their birth, the parallels to the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany are impossible to ignore. Which is why the absence of outrage or any seeming effort to bring the perpetrators to justice is particularly horrifying.

Just for clarity - I wasn't comparing this to the holocaust - the use of the phrase `concentration camp` was in the wider sense, as in the British in South Africa circa 1900 and so on. Clumsy use of words by me.

 

[laptop]

The story trickles out beyond Ireland: one column on (one-fifth of) p32 in today's Times. From their Rome correspondent.

 

[likesfish]

Which were never meant to be death camps incompetance lead to that
Nobody puts the brightest and best in charge of camps but even with the shocking incompetance of the boer war they were amazingly crap.

 

[aqua]

It is completely beyond me that not one person spoke out for those children. How could anyone know about it and let it happen when these children were in their care.
Very simple - they can't!

I thought I read somewhere people did away something but that it was hushed up

 

[Buckaroo]

They weren't. See my post upthread.

Ok, I'll put it another way, many victims of church institutional abuse in Ireland weren't baptised but the idea that only children who weren't baptised became victims of such abuse is wrong. That's what's being said, that these children were victims because they weren't baptised. One line from a media report that this was just a religious thing, that it didn't involve the state, doctors, cops etc. That's the point I was trying to make.

eta Of the children that ended up in this institution, some would have been born out of wedlock and not baptised and others due to family break up, parental deaths, financial hardship and such but who were baptised. The BBC report you quote states that the children were denied baptism. Says who?

 

[Betsy]

I thought I read somewhere people did away something but that it was hushed up

Thanks for that,aqua - a scandal that the ones who could have done something seemingly brushed it under the carpet.

 

[likesfish]

Some of the nuns and monks did report it up the line as you were suppoused to do and nothing happened
Bit like the military you do what your told and expect your leaders to do the right thing

 

[Humberto]

Some of the nuns and monks did report it up the line as you were suppoused to do and nothing happened
Bit like the military you do what your told and expect your leaders to do the right thing

I think that is making excuses for them likesfish.

 

[frogwoman]

Children in other similar homes were used as guinea pigs in secret drug trials
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...al-800-dead-babies-planned.html#ixzz33s6ScCpz

Wtf that is some Nazi shit.

Are there any survivors support groups we can donate to?

 

[frogwoman]

This is fucking beyond belief, poor kids

 

[Buckaroo]

This.

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/800-babies-mass-grave-tuam-1501507-Jun20

and this from Catherine Corless

http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterf...psis-of-her-research-on-tuam-motherbaby-home/

 

[weepiper]

I think we have to see it in the context of how unmarried mothers were generally treated in Ireland at that time. This is almost unreadable

When Ms Goulding asked why she could not access needles to stitch women who had been torn during childbirth, she was told she was not allowed to open the cabinet. “I’m afraid, nurse, the key to that cabinet has never been handed over. Girls must suffer their pain and put up with the pain of being torn — she [the nun] says they should atone for their sin.”

 

[The Pale King]

Just for clarity - I wasn't comparing this to the holocaust - the use of the phrase `concentration camp` was in the wider sense, as in the British in South Africa circa 1900 and so on. Clumsy use of words by me.

I was not using the term 'concentration camp' as a synonym for 'extermination camp'. Such a definition would include those created and staffed by the British in South Africa but would exclude (for example) Sobibor and Treblinka. Auschwitz-Birkenau began as a concentration camp but was repurposed into an extermination camp. I assert that these Irish camps are essentially concentration camps, not extermination camps.

 

[frogwoman]

I think we have to see it in the context of how unmarried mothers were generally treated in Ireland at that time. This is almost unreadable

Wtf???

 

[yield]

I think we have to see it in the context of how unmarried mothers were generally treated in Ireland at that time. This is almost unreadable

Such cruelty.

 

[spanglechick]

Such cruelty.

It's just... how hard does your heart have to be to see suffering like that and think that a bit of an unmarried shag means you deserve it? Where is the compassion. The *mercy*...? Christians are supposed to believe in mercy, right? Or just - the fucking humanity. Where was that?

I think, I can only think - that the nuns must have compartmentalised these mothers and children as being somehow subhuman. Like slave owners must have done. A bit like an unsentimental farmer dealing with livestock. But... maybe that's letting them off too lightly. The cutting the lawns with scissors? It's vindictive.

 

[etnea]

I keep coming back to thinking about life in a convent school in late 70s Ireland. The nuns berating or beating us if we didn't finish our dinners and telling us to think of the "poor starving children in Africa". How hypocritical. Maybe you should think of the poor starving children in your orphanages.

My experience was a little later, and not in Tuam, but it seems that this abuse was pretty widespread, and the sisters of mercy (ha!) ran the industrial school in the town where I lived, which closed in 1965, and then opened the convent where I went to school. These hypocrites were probably the same women who a few years before were enforcing who knows what sort of appalling regime at the industrial school.

It makes me sick that the church got away with this for years and there will be no real redress now - what could possibly be appropriate. Perhaps disbanding all the convents. Preventing nuns or priests from ever again working with children. I know that is an emotional, unworkable response, but I am so upset by all this.

 

[goldenecitrone]

It's just... how hard does your heart have to be to see suffering like that and think that a bit of an unmarried shag means you deserve it? Where is the compassion. The *mercy*...? Christians are supposed to believe in mercy, right? Or just - the fucking humanity. Where was that?

I think, I can only think - that the nuns must have compartmentalised these mothers and children as being somehow subhuman.

They probably saw them more as terrible sinners who had to be punished for their shocking immorality. The harsher the punishments they could mete out, the happier their God would be.

 

[Red Cat]

They probably saw them more as terrible sinners who had to be punished for their shocking immorality. The harsher the punishments they could mete out, the happier their God would be.

No, I think it was vengeance, born of envy.

 

[weepiper]

No, I think it was vengeance, born of envy.

So cruel. No empathy whatsoever. These women, making other women suffer, in a way that they would never have to themselves. It's really hard to reconcile. I've had mastitis and it was possibly the illest I've ever felt without being hospitalised, until the antibiotics kicked in. How could someone deny painkillers and treatment for that? It's inhumane.

 

[Betsy]

I think we have to see it in the context of how unmarried mothers were generally treated in Ireland at that time. This is almost unreadable

I saw the film Philomena earlier this year and how the mothers were treated was beyond belief.

Hard to comprehend that women would treat other women in such a dispassionate manner... I am alluding to the nuns in the film.