Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes are a stain on the Catholic church - but this latest refusal to atone is a new low
There are some stories so horrifying that their details embed themselves in your flesh and haunt you for the rest of your days. The suffering of the women and babies – an estimated 170,000 of them – who were incarcerated and abused in the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes that housed “fallen women” is one such story: from the testimonies of abuse and forced adoption, to the mass grave at the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home near Tuam, County Galway, which contained 796 bodies of babies and children. The nuns put many of them in a septic tank. There were no burial records.
This week, it was reported that, of the eight religious organisations linked to Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, only two have offered to contribute to a survivor redress scheme.
The other five – the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Legion of Mary and the (Anglican) Church of Ireland – made no offer. They gave various reasons – or excuses, depending on your viewpoint. Ireland’s children’s minister, Norma Foley, expressed her disappointment, saying that, while the state had admitted its role in the scandal, more should have been done by the church and the religious organisations.
The Good Shepherd Sisters, as they are now known, have made particularly impressive use of grammatical gymnastics over the years (“We sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt and hardship”). Perhaps most shocking was this: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.”
Yet the church wasn’t just part of that culture. It was the culture, saturating every aspect of life in Ireland, shaping public attitudes towards women and their babies, encouraging their shaming and ostracising. Some campaigners have called for church assets to be seized unless the institution contributes to a state-run redress scheme.
Nothing from the nuns, or the Catholic church, has really come close to expressing true remorse. Without a true acknowledgment of the pain that has been caused, how do you begin to move on from something so traumatic?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...lic-church
There are some stories so horrifying that their details embed themselves in your flesh and haunt you for the rest of your days. The suffering of the women and babies – an estimated 170,000 of them – who were incarcerated and abused in the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes that housed “fallen women” is one such story: from the testimonies of abuse and forced adoption, to the mass grave at the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home near Tuam, County Galway, which contained 796 bodies of babies and children. The nuns put many of them in a septic tank. There were no burial records.
This week, it was reported that, of the eight religious organisations linked to Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, only two have offered to contribute to a survivor redress scheme.
The other five – the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Legion of Mary and the (Anglican) Church of Ireland – made no offer. They gave various reasons – or excuses, depending on your viewpoint. Ireland’s children’s minister, Norma Foley, expressed her disappointment, saying that, while the state had admitted its role in the scandal, more should have been done by the church and the religious organisations.
The Good Shepherd Sisters, as they are now known, have made particularly impressive use of grammatical gymnastics over the years (“We sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt and hardship”). Perhaps most shocking was this: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.”
Yet the church wasn’t just part of that culture. It was the culture, saturating every aspect of life in Ireland, shaping public attitudes towards women and their babies, encouraging their shaming and ostracising. Some campaigners have called for church assets to be seized unless the institution contributes to a state-run redress scheme.
Nothing from the nuns, or the Catholic church, has really come close to expressing true remorse. Without a true acknowledgment of the pain that has been caused, how do you begin to move on from something so traumatic?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...lic-church
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
