Bodies of 800 Fabies Found at Former Catholic Home for Unwed Mothers

For readers who have not seen the movie Philomena, you need to do so.  It is based on a true story and it is an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church and what Catholic institutions did to "fallen women," many of them mere girls.  Now an even more gruesome story is out about the Children’s Home, Dublin Road, Tuam, Ireland, run by the Sisters of Bon Secours.  The grounds of the institution have yielded the bodies of some 800 babies, the "illegitimate children" of the girls who were treated little better than prison inmates.   Sadly, I have friends who continue to close their eyes to the horrors the Church - and Christianity in general - has wrought and the mindset that allows individuals to be stripped of their humanity and mistreated in the name of God. The mindset is alive and well today in the Church's treatment of gays.  The Church has much to atone for.  The question is whether anyone will ever force such atonement which will not come voluntarily.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the horrible discovery in Ireland:

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-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 we 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 has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure 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 a batch of never-before-released 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.”

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.”

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.”

Locals suspect the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”

Bon Secours translates to "good help" or "safe harbor" yet that was the last thing children found in many such homes.  Frighteningly, the Bon Secours operate three hospitals in the Hampton Roads area.  Needless to say, being gay, they are not where I would go if I needed health care.