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Footnote to Footnote to Footnote: The Story of the Home for Unwed Mothers in Tuam, Ireland Again — More on Baptismal Status of Children Buried There
William D. Lindsey
A footnote to a footnote to a footnote: some days back, I noted that in the initial thread here discussing the story of the unmarked graves of children and babies at a home for unwed mothers in Tuam, Co. Galway, Ireland, readers had suggested that the children buried in unmarked graves had been denied baptism. As I also noted in that posting several days ago, I responded to this claim by noting that I hadn’t ever heard of a practice of denying baptism to illegitimate children, and I doubted that this claim was true.
But then I noted that I had come across several articles that appeared to be reporting that some of the children buried at this home for unwed mothers had, indeed, been denied baptism due to the circumstances of their birth. I cited those articles, so that readers might be able to compare the conflicting claims re: the Tuam story being made in this or that article.
I subsequently added another footnote noting that Salon author Mary Elizabeth Williams was deploring what she called the “pathetic scramble” to spin the Tuam story in a way that denied the ill-treatment dished out to both mothers and children in these homes in Ireland over the course of many years.
And now I want to direct readers’ attention to another article that specifically focuses on the claim that children were denied baptism at the Tuam home, and which seeks to refute that claim: this is Kevin Clarke’s recent “Galway Horror” article at America. I encourage readers of the previous threads to read this latest addition to the discussion of the baptismal status of the children buried in the unmarked graves behind the Tuam facility.
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