UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • June 10, 2014
The Irish Times pokes more holes in the initial reporting of the Tuam story. Excerpt:
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.” …
At this point, it doesn’t appear that the story, while still horrific, is not as bad as it appeared when first reported. That is, it doesn’t seem that the children were especially mistreated at the Catholic home, and their bodies disrespected because they were the issue of unmarried parents. It seems — I keep saying “seems,” because there’s still a lot we don’t know about the “Home Babies” case — anyway, it seems that the high death rate had a lot to do with Ireland’s poverty at the time, and while illegitimate children were harshly and cruelly stigmatized in Ireland at the time, that ought to be understood in context of the era, its intense poverty, and the conservatism of all Irish society, not just the Roman Catholic Church. I could be wrong. We’ll see.
It’s wrong to call all this “good news,” but to me, it is a relief to learn that the Church may be less culpable than the initial reports indicated. I posted the shocking first story, and have posted the debunking follow-ups as they’ve become available. That hasn’t stopped pious Tom Piatak, a stringer for a turgid Midwestern monthly, from losing his grip over my blogging. A “bitter apostate” he calls me, which is theologically ignorant; according to the Catechism, an “apostate” is one who totally repudiates Christianity, while a “schismatic” is one who affirms Christianity but who does not submit to the Roman pontiff. But this isn’t really about theology with him, but rather tribal breast-beating:
Rod Dreher’s desire to pass judgment on Irish Catholicism on the basis of one poorly sourced story, and Andrew Sullivan’s desire to jettison sexual morality on the basis of that same story, tell us that they cannot be trusted when it comes to the Catholic Church.
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