UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • June 3, 2014
… thrown into the sewer, by Catholic nuns. From the Washington Post:
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. …
These poor children were treated as subhumans by nuns, and by the Church, and the State that didn’t dare speak up for them, all because those babies came into the world outside of wedlock.
Look, this revolting monument to ecclesial and social evil does not obviate the importance of marriage, nor does it obviate the truth of Christianity. It does not make unwed childbearing good or desirable. But it does condemn a Catholic Ireland that saw sexual purity as more important than human life, or common decency. To children. Children seen by Christ’s own consecrated brides as so filthy they deserved burial in a septic tank.
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