Selling dead babies shows how low Church would go
THE disclosure that up to 1,000 missing babies and infant bodies were sold for the equivalent of 65c tells us one thing… the Catholic Church really hated children.
And the nuns that served it held a special contempt for what they called the illegitimate offspring who were condemned to the hellish mother and baby homes which they operated.
In life they and their mothers were mistreated and malnourished – one home had a 68% infant death rate – and when the youngsters died in their thousands their little bodies were dumped in unmarked graves or sewers.
Such was the nuns’ twisted religious
beliefs and their total lack of humanity they deemed these little souls didn’t deserve a Christian burial.
The death pit at the former home in Tuam, Co Galway, where hundreds of what we now call little angels were dumped in chambers off a septic tank, is testament to a church with closer links to Satan than Jesus.
The report by the Commission Of Investigation On Mother And Baby Homes has apparently caused much distress with the Taoiseach saying Irish society inherits “deep shame”.
Leo might be a little off the mark there as the nuns involved appear to have no shame and are still claiming they did nothing wrong.
The report also appears to have caused severe memory loss as it says people who must have been involved are not coming forward to help document what took place and help track down what amounts to a missing generation.
To get a grasp of these horrors the report found more than 900 children died at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork but the Commission has not been able to establish where the vast majority of them have been buried.
It also documents how one porter was selling dead babies on the side for 10 shillings a go (65c) to a medical school where they were dissected and experimented on.
No Christian burials for these little boys and girls and, in many cases, no one knows what happened to their bodies.
They didn’t even have names, they were referred to as “anatomical subjects”.
They might have been fed to pigs for all we know because of people who dump and sell infants bodies as if they were pieces of meat are capable of anything. Ireland really is a very strange country where religious orders treat the bodies of infants like dirt yet preach about the sacredness of the foetus. The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, who is a thoroughly good man, said yesterday the “Church has to change”. We’ve heard similar calls after each new scandal but the changes are slow to come and cash for compensation and recompense even slower.
Down the years families of missing children and survivors of these homes have tried to expose the horrors which took place but there was little political will to investigate until recently.
On the other hand it was not unusual for insults to be flung across the Dail at Sinn Fein TDS over the dozen or so Disappeared by the IRA from TDS who whose parties were in power when thousands of babies went missing.
The same venom is not directed at those responsible for the mother and DON’T laugh, they’ve set up what they’re calling the Irish Banking Culture Board which will hopefully prevent the country’s financial institutions from robbing and generally screwing their customers on an industrial scale. While there’s no guarantee it will prevent the banks money laundering for criminals, defrauding account holders or selling off tens of thousands of family homes to ruthless vulture funds, at least they will now know it’s not ethical. It just shows you how bad these people are when you have to have a special agency to help them understand the difference between right and wrong. baby home scandal. Then again, there’s no political threat posed by a few dozen elderly nuns.
The fact is only for the work of local historian Catherine Corless the thousands of innocents condemned to these facilities would have been forgotten.
Ironically, when these abominations were taking place Ireland was presenting itself as the land of saints and scholars to the extent that there was severe censorship imposed in case the devout might be contaminated by newspapers, books and films from heathen Britain.
Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the Republic and we have much to celebrate but unfortunately also a lot to be ashamed of for most of the seven Tuam, Co Galway
decades.
For the children of the poor back then Ireland was anything but free, it was downright dangerous and for those who fell into the clutches of religious orders it could be a death sentence.
While they don’t actually starve children to death these days we have a Government which is ideologically opposed to providing their families with what we once called council houses.
Ireland has changed in many ways in those 70 years, unfortunately when it comes to the welfare of poor children it’s very much the same. LIKE a lot of people here who have seen the wonder that is Notre Dame I actually shed a tear when I watched it engulfed in flames. The loss of what is an icon of European culture saddened even the heart of atheists but knowing the French they will restore their great cathedral within the five years promised by President Emmanuel Macron. What’s the betting visitors will again walk through the great doors before youngsters enter the wards of the new Children’s Hospital and certainly earlier than broadband is delivered to rural Ireland?