IRELAND
Commonweal

David Carroll Cochran
August 12, 2014

For an Irish Catholic Church desperate for good news, the bad keeps coming. Most recent are the revelations about a mother-and-child home run by the Bons Secours sisters in the town of Tuam, County Galway, which operated from 1925 to 1961. While some early, highly sensationalized media reports about hundreds of dead babies dumped into a septic tank have turned out to be false, details about the treatment of children—their living conditions, mortality rates, and burial after death—unleashed a fresh round of shock and outrage in a nation that has seen plenty of both during two decades of reports detailing a history of physical and sexual abuse in Catholic settings.

This string of revelations has obviously sparked blistering criticism of the church in Ireland. Much of it is deserved, but it is also important to understand the multiple dimensions of…