How difficult is it to be a Catholic now?

Good God. I hadn't heard about the bodies of those babies. I am shocked to the core.

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?”

Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the 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. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.”

According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

Oh my its all quite horrific it doesn't bear thinking about. Apparently there are no records of who these poor little souls were.

And from the Guardian, the Archbishop we should not judge !!! It is quite possible the same happened in all the other similar homes dotted around Ireland, and until the mid 20th C. Where are they?

Father Fintan Monaghan, secretary of the Tuam archediocese, says: "I suppose we can't really judge the past from our point of view, from our lens. All we can do is mark it appropriately and make sure there is a suitable place here where people can come and remember the babies that died."

Let's not judge the past on our morals, then, but on the morals of the time. Was it OK, in mid-20th century Ireland, to throw the bodies of dead children into sewage tanks? Monaghan is really saying: "don't judge the past at all". But we must judge the past, because that is how we learn from it.

Monaghan is correct that we need to mark history appropriately. That's why I am offering the following suggestions as to what the church should do to in response:

Do not say Catholic prayers over these dead children. Don't insult those who were in life despised and abused by you. Instead, tell us where the rest of the bodies are. There were homes throughout Ireland, outrageous child mortality rates in each. Were the Tuam Bon Secours sisters an anomalous, rebellious sect? Or were church practices much the same the country over? If so, how many died in each of these homes? What are their names? Where are their graves? We don't need more platitudinous damage control, but the truth about our history.

Good post granjura, what a shower those Irish nuns were [and thats being polite.]It doesn't surprise me, but it does sadden me.It has to be said that Catholic nuns all over the world were not like that, but Irish nuns! In fact, don't get me started because I grew up in schools with them, narrow minded, bigoted, repressed and usually not very intelligent, is how I found them.

So shocking. And all this happened not so very long ago.
The truth must come out.

So did Carol, and she harboured dreadful feelings towards them and the Church that protected them.

Because these children were born 'out of wedlock' they were considered essentially worthless, and worse than that, as an insult to the righteous just by being alive.That would be how they were regarded by the nuns.Very little would be done for them in illness, and because they were underfed, they went down like ninepins from the usual childhood ailments.The nuns still said their prayers morning noon and night, but there would have been little kindness for the children or their mothers.

I don't find it hard to be a Catholic. Yes, some terrible things were done in the name of the church in the past - and these must be fully investigated and made public, but that isn't the church that I know today.

Over time we have come to understand that various abhorrent practices among some Muslim communities (FGM, honour killings) arise not from their religion, even though they use religion to justify them, but from far deeper cultural norms

When it comes to Christianity it never occurs to us that some national christian communities also embrace practices that are abhorrent to us and justify them on religious grounds.

Very few people have any understanding and appreciation of Irish history and the privations and humiliations and dehumanisation that was imposed upon them by the English government and English absentee landlords. It made the Irish, even in their own country, inward looking and defensive. In previous times their only leaders were their priests, also part of the community they came from, and often barely literate, so when the many legal restrictions on them began to be lifted it was inevitable that there was little or no line between church and state.

Large families, very little land, also the result of English legal changes. meant that to have a child, male or female go into the religious life brought a family economic benefits as well as prestige within the community. Economic benefits because it was a child well settled and provided for, a child who would be childless and reduce the number of family members land had to be shared between. Roughly between the 1850s and 1970s pushing children into the religious life was a most effective birth control measure.

The result was many young people were pushed into a religious and celibate community life that they did not want and were not suited to. For a child dedicated to the church by their family to refuse to enter religious life, or leave it, brought enormous shame on the family. So much so that they could often never return home, and I knew a woman disowned by her family for leaving the convent who emigrated to England and hadn't heard from her family for 30 years.

It also meant that for a woman to produce a child, an extra mouth to feed, with out a husband so that its care and support was thrown back on her own family was to impose a heavy economic burden of feeding and providing for it and could affect the division of property. Such women would be rejected by their families.

These circumstances, particular to Ireland, produced an Irish church and society that colluded together to produce that explosive mix of too many people in religious life, many of whom who were totally unsuited for it and a society that utterly rejected women who had children that were unwanted by their wider families.

I am not defending what has happened in the Magdelan Laundries or Mother and Baby homes, anymore than one can defend FGM but there needs to be an understanding of why this happened and Irish secular society has to accept that it is as much responsible for what happened.

Sorry this is so long. I am half Irish and half English and in recent years have begun to read about the deeper social and economic history of Ireland and begun to understand how deeply Irish society was damaged by English government rule which used its religion in an attempt to destroy Irish culture and religion.

Excellent post Flickety. Of course all abuse and other violations of human rights must be condemned whoever and wherever they come from. But I do detect a note of moral self righteousness from those who see themselves as occupying the moral high ground. Delve deep into the history of any country and there is plenty to be ashamed of. Witness he reasons, for example, for the estaishment of the Foundling Hospital in England and much more. As for the OP's question - it's never easy trying to live by the principles of the gospels whichever Christian tradition one belongs to. But we try.

In those days elsewhere in the UK an unmarried girl who had a baby was sometimes shunted off to a mental hospital, or to a colony for the mentally slow.
I heard that report on Radio4 this morning too - horrifying, but in view of the background that Flickety gives more understandable.
And as for Catholics, I know of several devout catholic families who I would trust implicitly.

The Catholic Church has been operating a cover up for donkey's years in all kinds of abuse.I know it, you all know it, the world knows it.We are not talking of individual families that you trust [or don't trust]. I imagine that it IS hard to be be a Catholic today, or harder than it was say, in the past.
We now know what has gone on, and some of it quite recently.The present Pope does want to weed out the wrongdoers, but he is old, and will have his work cut out for him.

FlicketyB is quite right with the history and background info about Ireland, I only ever met one nun who I thought had a vocation, the rest were clearly resentful. Hopefully that will now be a thing of the past.It would also be helpful to allow priests to marry, cutting out the need for them to have secret mistresses, house-keepers etc.

FlicketyB When you say 'English', do you mean British or specifically English?

I agree entirely with MiceElf's post. But on a different note, there is a lot of information about the babies' grave at Tuam. A local historian, Catherine Corless, has been researching the mother and baby home for some years and the birth and death records of the children who died there. The bones were first rediscovered in 1972 and it seems local people knew all about it. The nuns who ran it on behalf of the Irish government were a French nursing order invited over to Ireland to do so. They ran it from 1925 to 1961 when it was closed and all the records were handed over to the local authorities. There are some very wild stories in some of the coverage in the media. Cover-up' hardly suits this case which is quite bad enough without sensationally adding to it.

From reading some of the Irish Times and other news online I had read most local people thought the large number buried at the site must be from the days of the potato famine. Is there also not a question as to whether these nuns were getting funding from the State per child too?

Sorry my link fell off my last posting.
Catherine Corless talking in a video from the Irish Times.
www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/coalition-willing-to-widen-tuam-inquiry-to-other-institutions-1.1822892

No, not moral self-righteousness, one cannot be self-righteous about events like these, but it is only in recent years when I have visited Ireland and learnt more about the nitty gritty of the oppressive measures inflicted on the catholic Irish after the battle of the Boyne and the casual cruelty and neglect of absentee English land owners that I have begun to understand why so many Irish are still willing to support the IRA and vote for Sinn Fein.

I also came to understand how a community ghettoised and cut off from any wider life in its own country can turn in on itself and develop a culture that can be as hard on its own as the outside world is on the embattled community.

Sexual abuse in the catholic church constantly attracts attention because as a world wide organisation cases will occur within the church in almost any country, but in Britain is it anymore endemic in the catholic church than in local authority children's homes? In the last week there have been appalling revelations of systemic sexual abuse in Rochdale, and there have been a series of previous revelations and probably more to come about similar abuse in other LA children's homes. We have had cases recently that reveal the extent to which sexual abuse occurred within boys prep schools and do you remember all those jokes about vicars and choir boys, totally unacceptable now. It is also clear that within the entertainment industry until recently there has been an acceptance that sexual abuse of all kinds has been tolerated and accepted by most of those working in the industry at every level

Yet LA children's homes and prep schools are not demonised because of the incidence of sex abuse within their organisations nor has there been wholesale damnation of show business because so many of its members felt they had right to sexual molest any member of the public who came within their life and career. That the catholic church should be condemned for its protection of those within its community who abuse others is absolutely right, that it should have to take blame to a greater extent than other communities where abuse was systemic and organised in a way that did not happen within the church is unjust.

Good post, flick, as always, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. The RC church sets itself up to teach morality and pretends that you can't have morality without faith and religion, so I don't think it is unjust when it appears that more blame is attached to it for wrongdoings within it. Besides, it hid the abusers so that they went on to abuse again.

The church does not teach that there is no morality without faith and religion.

As for cover ups, they are to be abhorred and condemned wheteber they occur, but that is not exclusive to the church. Just take a look at what happened in Rochdale or the BBC or in many children's homes or in homes for the elderly.

Sadly, all big institutions seek to protect themselves. They shouldn't, but they do.

Thatbags I was going to say exactly the same as you.The Catholic Church is not just any old 'big institution' that seeks to cover up wrongdoing to children.Whatever problems people experienced in Ireland in the past, all the nuns I came into contact with in the 1950's and 60's were [except one!] absolute bitches to children, especially girls, who they came down harder on than boys.Not talking serious abuse here [although it was verbal and physical abuse for no good reason.]They may well have been 'in the wrong job' but they had a cushy life here.However, I agree it's not just Catholic priests/nuns doling out cruelty and abuse, but they should be THE LAST people doing this, as Jesus says [written in the bible] 'suffer the little children to come unto me' [and goes on to say how anybody hurting a child should forget about Heaven for themselves.]Do you think this has been misunderstood as 'make the little children suffer'?

And in England and Wales unmarried mothers were put in workhouses and asylums by their parents. Mothers were forced to give up their babies for adoption by their parents, girls were subjected to illegal abortions, the more affluent families paid for their daughters to have abortions in nursing homes - where the girls went to recuperate from nervous ailments !

Sexual abuse was rife in childrens homes and let's not forget the many children who were shipped off to Australia

No one knows how many of those babies born in Ireland were conceived through rape, a frightened girl would cry rape rather than admit she was 'willing'

Follow the North Wales abuse enquiries, a judge can order the names of alleged abusers should not be made public for fear they may sue the council.

Irosesarered, I was brought up a Catholic and your comments about nuns being absolute bitches certainly resonates with me. I don't think I have ever encountered such spiteful people, one or two exceptions, but in the main they were horrible. Never got over being given the blackboard rubber on my hand, the hard wooden bit, aged 7 for supposedly looking insolent. As far as I was concerned I was sitting at my desk facing the front and trying to pay attention. At my convent senior school we weren't allowed to make eye contact with the nuns, it was deemed as "being bold" instead we were expected to stare at the floor. Sounds positively Dickensian, but again only the '60s. Today of course not making eye contact would be a cause for concern.