Catholic Church Crimes: Mass Grave of 700+ Children of Unwed Mothers in Ireland

Thanks to the constant political turmoil in America, media coverage has been diverted from the continuing moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church.  Sex abuse scandals continue to rage in Australia, Guam and other parts of the world with the Church hierarchy fighting tooth and claw to cover up crimes against children and youths and to avoid paying compensation to rape and abuse victims.  Now a new bombshell has come out of Ireland, once a bastion of Catholicism, where a mass grave of 700 to 800 children has been discovered at the Mother and Baby Home operated by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, Ireland.   These small victims are but more of the lives destroyed over the centuries by the Church's warped 12th century approach to human sexuality and the obsession of bitter old men, many closeted self-loathing gays, with all things sexual. The hypocrisy and toxicity of the Church is mind numbing and I again ask how anyone moral and decent can continue to attend and financially support the institution.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the gruesome discovery:

Between 1925 and the 1960s, in a tiny town called Tuam in western Ireland’s County Galway, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Mother and Baby Home operated by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours. After a period of involuntary service and penance, many of the women who came to the home left to resume their lives, as The Post’s Terrence McCoy reported in 2014.

But some of the children did not leave. And what became of them remained a mystery into which few cared to inquire.

But after painstaking research, a local historian named Catherine Corless became convinced in 2014 that the infants and small children — perhaps 700 to 800 of them — died in the home and were buried without markers in mass graves beneath the property, perhaps in an underground structure such as a septic tank.

The story, which attracted worldwide publicity, was met with skepticism and even suggestions that it was a hoax. It wasn’t.

A commission established by the Irish government in response to her research and the ensuing controversy has reportedfinding “significant quantities of human remains” in 17 “underground chambers” inside a buried structure.
 There is no uncertainty about the remains.

A small number of them were recovered for analysis, the commission reported. “These remains,” it said, “involved a number of individuals with age-at-death ranges” from approximately 35 fetal weeks to 2-to-3 years.

“Radiocarbon dating of the samples recovered suggest that the remains date from the time frame relevant to the operation of the Mother and Baby Home,” the commission said. “A number of the samples are likely to date from the 1950s.”

The commission said it was “shocked” by the discovery and “is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way.” “This is very sad and disturbing news,” Katherine Zappone, Ireland’s minister for children and youth affairs, said in a statement. “It was not unexpected, as there were claims about human remains on the site over the last number of years.” In a statement published in the Irish Times, the Bon Secours sisters said they were “fully committed to the work of the commission regarding the mother and baby home in Tuam. … On the closing of the home in 1961, all the records for the home were returned to Galway County Council, who are the owners and occupiers of the lands of the home. We can therefore make no comment on today’s announcement, other than to confirm our continued cooperation with and support for the work of the commission in seeking the truth about the home.” Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home, Corless told The Post in 2014. “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.” Corless’s research found that infant mortality at the home in Tuam was particularly high. Records for that home show that babies died at the rate of two per week from malnutrition and neglect, and from diseases such as measles and gastroenteritis, Corless told the Post in 2014.

Her interest in a subject others preferred to forget began when she was doing research for an annual local historical journal. 

The commission is already investigating how unmarried mothers and their babies were treated between 1922 and 1998 at 18 religious institutions used by the state. . . . . the religious [orders] knew it and it was just all nicely covered in and forgotten about.

The truth is the last thing that the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours or the Church hierarchy wants exposed to daylight.