As one who was raised Catholic knew would happen, apologists for the Catholic Church have rushed forward to describe those outraged by the news of the bodies of over 800 babies discovered in a septic tank at a former Catholic home for unwed mothers as "anti-Catholicism." Sadly, there are those within the Church who simply refuse to open their eyes to the horrors that Catholicism and a Church hierarchy have wrought over the centuries. Amazingly, Andrew Sullivan, who too often closes his eyes to the inherent sickness of the Catholic Church, simply could not take the lies and historical re-constructionists who sought to excuse the Church for the evils done in Ireland. Here are money quotes from Sullivan:
In Ireland, there are stirrings for a full investigation into the staggering news that a former home for unmarried mothers and their children was effectively a death camp for infants, and close to 800 were buried in a septic tank.There are now calls to investigate all the sites once run by this sadistic, wicked order in order to discover how many children were neglected, abused and thrown away like so much trash. I’d say that’s a start. In my view, the entire order should be shut down by the Vatican until we have a much better understanding of these crimes, who knew about them, and when. There should also surely be a thorough attempt to find anyone still connected with this cover-up for investigation and possible prosecution. Like war crimes, these horrifying abuses should know no statute of limitations.Meanwhile, it simply staggers me to find bloggers deflecting blame away from the church.These children were treated as sub-human because their births violated a Catholic doctrine that there can be no sex outside of marriage. The young women – denied contraception, of course – were equally subject to horrifying stigmatization, hatred, and inhumane rules that took their children away from them. None of this would have ever taken place without this doctrine, and the insistence that it be enforced without exception and relentlessly. No society has ever lived up to this standard, but in Ireland, where the church was fused with the state, they gave it about as good a try as possible. And in order to enforce it, in order to inculcate shame at the deepest level imaginable to prevent human love, passion and sex breaking out, cruelty was necessary.[W]hen you look at societies which are still like Ireland once was, where church and state were fused, you see much of the same horror: the dehumanization and subjugation of women, female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, and the brutal murder of gay people. Does Rod not see a pattern here? And the entire fiction of a more virtuous past is only made possible by literally making its victims as invisible as those infant bodies in a septic tank. The countless gay lives of intense psychic pain, the innumerable heart-breaks, the forced separation of mothers and children, the brutalization of innocents, and the immiseration of people whose only crime was to experience their own bodies in ways unsanctioned by authority: these are all buried in order to retain the lie that this sexual ethic is the only virtuous one.[T]he absolutist paradigm in which any sex outside marriage is anathema is such an impossible standard for most that it will fail if not enforced with the kind of brutality seen in Ireland in the 1940s or Iran in the 2010s. My contention is that the rigidity of this standard is inextricably tied up with cruelty. And that cruelty is far, far greater a sin, than surrendering to our deepest nature, hurting no one.
I suspect we will see more disingenuous apologies from the Vatican, but ultimately it will all be lip service. No one and no religious orders will be punished for the evils they wrought. Thus, members of the Church will be forced to either become complicit in immoral behavior or vote with their feet and walk away from the Catholic Church. Over a decade ago, I chose the latter option.
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