UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Andrew Sullivan on Mass Grave of Irish Babies Born to “Fallen Women”: “That Is Not a Sign of a Church Gone Astray. It’s a Sign of a Church Given Over to Evil”
Andrew Sullivan looks at the discovery of the bodies of 800 babies in a mass grave (they were stuffed inside a septic tank) behind a home for “fallen women” run by the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, Ireland, and asks why such a kerfuffle ensued when the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture tried to indict the Vatican for “crimes against humanity” because of its cover-up of the mass rape and abuse of children. As he notes, what can possibly describe the story now emerging from Tuam except the term “crime against humanity”?
These children were born to “fallen women” who bore them while living at the facility of the Bon Secours nuns, and who were then left in the care of the nuns when these women moved on to new lives after serving a term of penance as virtual slave laborers for the nuns. Documents indicate that many of these children died of outright neglect and malnutrition — and when they died, their bodies were stuffed into a septic tank.
The heart of the matter for Andrew Sullivan:
To my mind, these foul crimes against women and children, along with the brutal stigmatization of gay people as “objectively disordered”, remain a testament to how the insidious, neurotic and usually misogynist fixation on sex has distorted and destroyed Christianity in ways we are only now beginning to recover from. For what we see here is the consequence of elevating sexual sin above all others, of fixating on human sexuality as the chief source of evil in the world, and of a grotesquely distorted sense of moral priorities, where stigmatization of the sexual sinner vastly outweighs even something as basic as care for an innocent child.
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