UNITED STATES
The Dish
Andrew Sullivan
You may recall the kerfuffle recently when the UN Rapporteur on Torture tried to indict the Vatican for “crimes against humanity” because of the widespread scheme, orchestrated by the church hierarchy, to facilitate and cover up the mass rape and sexual abuse of children. Many argued that the very term “crime against humanity” was over the top, fueled by anti-Catholicism or secularism, and effectively undermined itself by its extreme language.
But what can possibly describe the following unless it is a crime against humanity?
In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
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