Remains of a significant number of children lie in a mass grave adjacent to a former Catholic home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, County Galway. The Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order, ran the home. The grave consists of an underground structure divided into 20 chambers where the remains lie. The home received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted. But nearly 800 of them were never adopted, but died in the care of these nuns.
The grave was found by the state-established commission of inquiry into mother and baby homes, precisely where it was predicted to be. The site “appears to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water,” but which we are not supposed to call a septic tank,” said one observer.
Analysis of selected remains reveals that the ages of these children were between 35 weeks and three years. The commission found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the home was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.
“The archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, says he is “deeply shocked and horrified.” Is he really shocked? What could the church have known about the abuse of children in its institutions? When Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny was asked if he was similarly shocked, he answered: “Absolutely. To think you pass by the location on so many occasions over the years.” Really? What would Kenny, in Irish politics since the 70s, know about state-funded, church-perpetrated abuse of women and children?” Even the commission of inquiry… in its official statement said that it was “shocked by this discovery.”
With the discovery of 796 death certificates of children with only two burial records, it was obvious that there were a lot of bodies somewhere. Local oral histories offered evidence of where those children’s remains could be found.
Why all the shock? Is it over the nuns in mid-20th century Ireland that had so little regard for the life and death of the little children in their care?
The Ryan report in 2009 documented the systematic sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in church-run, state-funded institutions. It revealed that when confronted with evidence of child abuse, the church would transfer abusers to other institutions, where they could abuse other children. The Christian Brothers legally blocked the report from naming its members.” Meanwhile, Cardinal Seán Brady – now known to have participated in the cover up of abuse by a pedophile priest, expressed how ashamed he was.
“The same year, the Murphy report on the sexual abuse of children in the archdiocese of Dublin revealed that the Catholic church’s priorities in dealing with pedophilia were not child welfare, but rather secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of its reputation and the preservation of church assets.”
“In 2013, the McAleese report documented the imprisonment of more than 10,000 women in church-run, state-funded laundries, where they worked in punitive industrial conditions without pay for the crime of being unmarried mothers.”
The professional shock of Ireland’s clergy, politicians and official inquiring bodies seems rather, well, “professional,” and not unsurprising either.
“We know too much about the Catholic church’s abuse of women and children to be shocked by Tuam. A mass grave full of the children of unmarried mothers is an embarrassing landmark when the state is still paying the church to run its schools and hospitals. Hundreds of dead babies are not an asset to those invested in the myth of an abortion-free Ireland; they inconveniently suggest that Catholic Ireland always had abortions, just very late-term ones, administered slowly by nuns after the children were already born.” This is known as infanticide.
“As Ireland gears up for a strategically planned visit from the pope, it may be time to stop acting as though the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church are news to us.”
After the Ryan report, the Murphy report, the McAleese report, Cloyne report, the Ferns report, the Raphoe report and now Tuam it is now impossible for the church, government leaders and inquiry organizations to pretend they are shocked.
For their own reasons, otherwise good, kind people in Ireland handed power over these helpless children and their unwed mothers to an institution they knew was abusive. And in Ireland’s schools and hospitals, power is still being handed to the Catholic Church. Perhaps, after Tuam, after everything else, that’s what’s really shocking.
“The sins of Babylon will be laid open.” The Great Controversy, page 606.