I also have wondered what happened in the land of saints and scholars. I also cringe when I see what seems to be a lack of charity among Catholics, most especially traditional Catholics - because we, of all people, should know better.

But those who were responsible for the care of those hundreds of little ones that died and were disposed of as if they were nothing more than human waste, were not practising traditional Catholicism at all.

You say they were? OK, then. Show me a traditional Catholic source that teaches that illegitimate children's bodies should be disposed of as human waste.  

Do not despair. Do not be ashamed for the sins of others. Do not be too nationalistic. Other one-time Catholic countries have their own scandals.

This happened over 36 years.
 That equals about 22 deaths a year.
 From the 1944 report there were probably on average 300 kids in the home at any given time.
 That would be 3600 "kid units" per year and on average 22 "death units" per year.

The rate of death is .006. So, 6 kids in 1000 died on average.

 These women were abandoned by their families, it was a social issue- not an institutional issue.

I posted this in your earlier thread.

6 deaths in 1000 especially including a couple decades of pre air conditioning in damp Ireland hardly equates to a baby death camp.

About  a year ago a similar grave yard was discovered at a government reform school for boys here in the United States. Unmarked graves spanning decades until the late 1950s and the same unfounded judgmental conclusions with little critical thinking.

It is all over but the lawsuits.

Having read the replies to my posting and gone through the postings on the other thread discussing this problem, it seems to me my views have been vindicated.

With a few, very few exceptions, I see 'traditional Catholicism' is alive and well. The history of how children in the care of Catholic institutions were treated is coming to light bit by bit. This anti-Catholic treatment of 'sinners' lasted for years because GOOD TRADITIONAL CATHOLICS SIMPLY WOULD NOT HAVE ANYBODY THINk CATHOLIC PRIESTS, NUNS AND BROTHERS WOULD DO SUCH A THING.

Here I am, in 2014 and am witnessing the same 'CATHOLICS DO NOT DO SUCH THINGS on this forum. It was this KIND OF denial that caused endless suffering and death of children for ages.

In my opening post I did not say I have lost my faith, quite the opposite, it confirmed the kind of Catholic faith that Jesus Christ demonstrated while here on earth. But that kind of faith was not practiced by these nuns and priests and brothers that represented the Catholic Church in the past as we are now witnessing. And yes I know these scandals are being used by the antichrists to finally kill off any influence the Catholic Church may still have. But the two greatest scandals that finally undermined Christ's religion were those involving priests and brothers and now nuns representing 'traditional Catholicism.' but in fact were not very Christ and Mary like.

http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/Galway-historian-reveals-truth-behind-800-orphans-in-mass-grave.html

There is a growing international scandal around the history of The Home, a grim 1840’s workhouse in Tuam in Galway built on seven acres that was taken over in 1925 by the Bon Secours sisters, who turned it into a Mother and Baby home for “fallen women.”

The long abandoned site made headlines around the world this week when it was revealed that a nearby septic tank contained the bodies of up to eight hundred infants and children, secretly buried without coffins or headstones on unconsecrated ground between 1925 and 1961.

Now a local historian has stepped forward to outline the terrible circuмstances around so many lost little lives.

Catherine Corless, the local historian and genealogist, remembers the Home Babies well. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” Corless tells IrishCentral. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them.

“They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years,” Corless recalls.

Now a dedicated historian of the site, as a schoolgirl Corless recalls watching an older friend wrap a tiny stone inside a bright candy wrapper and present it as a gift to one of them.

“When the child opened it she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless says. “Of course I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time.”

But later – years later – Corless realized that the children she taunted had nobody. “Years after I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.”

Surrounded by an eight-foot high wall, Tuam, County Galway locals say that they saw little to nothing of the daily life of The Home or of the pregnant young mothers who arrived and left it without a word over the decades.

In the few surviving black and white photographs taken at the site no child is smiling. Instead they simply frown at the camera, their blank stares suggesting the terrible conditions.

crossbro posted
'This happened over 36 years.
That equals about 22 deaths a year.
From the 1944 report there were probably on average 300 kids in the home at any given time.
That would be 3600 "kid units" per year and on average 22 "death units" per year.
The rate of death is .006. So, 6 kids in 1000 died on average.
These women were abandoned by their families, it was a social issue- not an institutional issue.

The report continues:

A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243.

The report described the children as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” The report noted that 31 children in the “sun room and balcony” were “poor, emaciated and not thriving.” The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly.

Children died at The Home at the rate of one a fortnight for almost 40 years, one report claims. Another appears to claim that 300 children died between 1943 and 1946, which would mean two deaths a week in the isolated institution.

In The Home’s 36 years of operation between 1926 and 1961 some locals told the press this week of unforgettable interactions with its emaciated children, who because of their “sinful” origins were considered socially radioactive and treated as such.

One local said: “I remember some of them in class in the Mercy Convent in Tuam – they were treated marginally better than the traveler children. They were known locally as the “Home Babies.” For the most part the children were usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.”

Because of Corless’ efforts we now know the names and fates of up to 796 forgotten infants and children who died there, thanks to her discovery of their death records when researching The Home’s history.

“First I contacted the Bon Secours sisters at their headquarters in Cork and they replied they no longer had files or information about The Home because they had left Tuam in 1961 and had handed all their records over to the Western Health Board.”

Undaunted, Corless turned to The Western Health Board, who told her there was no general information on the daily running of the place.

“Eventually I had the idea to contact the registry office in Galway. I remembered a law was enacted in 1932 to register every death in the country. My contact said give me a few weeks and I’ll let you know.”

“A week later she got back to me and said do you really want all of these deaths? I said I do. She told me I would be charged for each record. Then she asked me did I realize the enormity of the numbers of deaths there?”

The registrar came back with a list of 796 children. “I could not believe it. I was dumbfounded and deeply upset,” says Corless. “There and then I said this isn’t right. There’s nothing on the ground there to mark the grave, there’s nothing to say it’s a massive children’s graveyard. It’s laid abandoned like that since it was closed in 1961.”

The certificates Corless received record each child’s age, name, date – and in some cases – cause of death. “I have the full list and it’s going up on a plaque for the site, which we’re fundraising for at the moment. We want it to be bronze so that it weathers better. We want to do it in honor of the children who were left there forgotten for all those years. It’s a scandal.”

Corless believes that nothing was said or done to expose the truth because people believed illegitimate children didn’t matter. “That’s what really hurts and moved me to do something,” she explains.

During its years of operation the children of The Home were referred to as “inmates” in the press. It was believed by the clergy that the harsh conditions there were in themselves a form of corrective penance. The state, the church and their families all failed these women, Corless contends.

But even now the unexpected difficulty that the local committee Corless has joined to fundraise for a plaque to remember the dead children suggests that not everyone wants to confront the truth about the building's tragic past.

“I do blame the Catholic Church,” says Corless. “I blame the families as well but people were afraid of the parish priest. I think they were brainwashed.  I suppose the lesson is not to be hiding things. To face up to reality.

“My fear is that if things aren’t faced now it’s very easy to slide back into this kind of cover-up again. I want the truth out there. If you give people too much power it’s dangerous.”

Living and dying in a culture of shame and silence for decades, the Home Babies' very existence was considered an affront to Ireland and God.

It was a different time, some defenders argued this week, omitting to mention that the stigmatizing silence that surrounded The Home was fostered by clerics. Indeed the religious orders were so successful at silencing their critics that for decades even to speak of The Home was to risk contagion.

And now that terrifying era of shame and silence is finally lifting, we are left to ask what all their lonesome suffering was in aid of, and what did it actually achieve?

To donate to the memorial for the mothers and babies of The Home, contact Catherine Corless at catherinecorless@hotmail.com.

As for Capt McQuigg's
'How do we know that these nuns didn't say prayers over the gravesite every single day, two or three times a day?
It is also very likely that these babies receive Last Rites.
The story is grossly overblown and probably loaded to the brim with falsehoods.
Even if entirely true, why would someone renounce Our Lady and Our Lord? Then the person doing the renouncing could join the damned forever.'

Having presided over the death of these segregated 'bastards,' the name given to babies of unwed mothers, it is nice to think they were treated like Catholics in the end, just before dumping them into a sewer tank.

I guess your accusations against the Popes of having taught error and/or allowing heresy to be taught has prepared you for your current belief in these propaganda fables. Shame on you for spreading these accusations here without giving the accused any chance of defence or explanation. I suppose the pietistic attitudes that lead to "Irish Jansenism" are not very far away from your current assertions of being established in a vague and sentimental "WWJD" type of "softer" and nicer "Catholic" "faith." You see, neither are based on a solid foundation ; both are based on percolated guilt and shame.

Your refusal to use the words "bastard" and "illegitimate" (which are objective descriptors, in this case objectively true) is evidence of this tendency towards a faith not of objective definitions, measured words, careful reasoning, and temperate behaviour, but one of self-justifying fantasy. You are dressing up your despair in sanctimony and nice-sounding but vain imaginings, like Francis, the nouvelle théologiens, Americanists, liberals, and all the rest of the little Jansenists who excuse their refusal to listen to and understand the Church with the language of a syrupy-sweet "faith" devoid of substance and by trafficking in sweet nothings whispered to oneself and others against strawman meanies.

There's a word for this scandalous behaviour ; it's called "hypocrisy" or else "pharisaism," when somebody exits orthodoxy and pursues a made-up "faith" because they are elevating themselves above the tares in the Church, from whom they are too ready to take scandal. But I guess you've made up your mind to not listen. I suppose you will say that I'm an enabler in denial, despite the fact that my whole point is that the issue is far bigger than you and than your small island.

As for me, I will continue to believe in the God of justice, light, and wisdom, He Who teaches that there is indeed a time for mildness and meekness, but there is also a time for discipline, stern correction, and for hardness against sin. You can't only have one side. You must take both, even if you were scandalised by a report of poor representatives of the one (despite never hearing their explanation and readily taking the word of the enemies of the Church against them without discrimination or mature consideration). After all, the old Church has good fruits. The conciliar Church and its spirit have nothing but rot and filth.

Cassini,

How do you know the bodies were just dumped?

Seriously.

Questions.

What is the total body count?

In what chronological order were the babies buried?

How many nuns were assigned to the home from 1925 - 1961?

Who discovered the so-called mass grave and when?

Why is Ms. Corless offering a memorial for the mothers who dumped their children but not for the nuns and priests who cared for them when heartless and Jansenist Ireland was so cruelly inclined to shun them?

If possible, please provide an answer to the best of your ability for each "?"

Much of what you ask has already been posted Capt. here is another report;

According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in Tuam, north of Galway city, between 1925 and 1961

Run by the Bon Secours nuns, “The Home” housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children over those years.

According to Irish Mail on Sunday the causes of death listed for “as many as 796 children” included “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.”

The babies were usually buried without a coffin in a plot that had once housed “a water tank,” the report claims. No memorials were erected, the site was left unmarked and unmourned.

The staggering mortality rate of “The Home” was apparently replicated elsewhere in Ireland.

The Sean Ross Mother and Baby Home, portrayed in the award winning film “Philomena” this year, opened in Roscrea, County Tipperary in 1930. In its first year of operation 60 babies died out of a total of 120, a fifty percent infant mortality rate, more than four times higher than in the general population at the time.

Statistics show a quarter of all babies born outside marriage in the 1930’s in Ireland died before their first birthdays. As observers have remarked elsewhere, these were infant death rates from the 17th century.

In one year alone in the mid 1940’s in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in County Cork, out of the 180 babies born 100 died.

Given the shockingly high mortality rates, it is hard not to conclude that the destabilizing threat these children represented to Irish society and its conservative religious ethos may have contributed to their untimely demise.

If 60 babies died in first year of the Sean Ross Abbey home alone, it’s a mathematical probability that hundreds more deaths could have occurred in the decades that followed (an estimated 50,000 babies were born in mother and baby homes throughout Ireland before they closed in the 1990’s).

Sean Ross Abbey was just one of the many mother and baby homes operated in the state, but the “illegitimate” stigma was not confined to Catholics alone. Reports show that 219 infants died in the Protestant Bethany home in Rathgar, County Dublin between 1922 and 1949.

As “Philomena” shows, many of the children who survived in the mothers and babies homes were later forcibly adopted, most often to the USA. Between 1945 and 1965 more than 2,200 Irish infants were forcibly adopted, an average of 110 children every year, or more than two a week.

Church officials have consistently denied that they ever received payments for these adoptions, insisting many of the papers and docuмents from that period were lost in a fire.

Since there was simply no question of the birth mothers keeping their children – the shame was thought too ruinous – they lost all future claim to them. Their punishment was to work without wages for two or three years in atonement for their sins. In the homes they wore uniforms at all times, they had their names changed and they had their letters censored.

Critics contend that the ongoing reluctance of Irish religious orders to hand over their internal records or compensate past victims of mothers and babies homes, Magdalene laundries and reform schools, can be traced to their alarm over being compelled to offer mandatory payments or fear that further horrors could come to light.

But calls for investigation of the various sites are growing. In the end, critics say, it should fall to the state itself to open the unmarked graves and count the dead. '
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ireland has many beautiful graveyards, some for religious, most for the flock. None have septic tanks. A body disposed in a septic tank is dumped as far as I am concerned.

One grave has almost 800 confirmed bodies.

Probably one or two a week.

No idea how many nuns, yet.

You might find more answers here:
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/The-Home-babies-in-the-news-A-timeline-of-neglect-in-plain-sight.html

Ask Mrs Coreless. I suspect she does not want to honour nuns who presided over an 800 body baby pit without even a cross.

The Irish government has now decided to investigate this scandal. In other cases like the abuse of children and the slave houses called laundries, official reports on these proved worse that reported origionally in newspapers.

Knowing how things work here in Ireland I can guarantee you will not like the findings of these scandals. The Irish still profess to be 90% Catholic and they are the witnesses recalling these times. You can hope they are all liars whose intention is to destroy the Catholic Church but I can tell you they are not, they are Irish people most of whom are Catholic, born Catholics. I listen to them every day on the radio and TV, ordinary people recalling their life experience.
And I do not speak of the commentators and newsmen who use these facts to destroy any remaining faith in Catholicism.

So now cassini calls the mortal sin of fornication a "loving mistake".

If there's fault on the part of some of the clergy, so be it; but you're quite stupid at taking any of this at face value.  You'd rather believe the devil-controlled anti-Catholic media than to give ANY benefit of the doubt to any Catholics.

I said the cause of unwanted babies happened under different circuмstances, one of them being a mistake by a man and woman in a loving relationship outside of wedlock.

I tell you what Ladislaus, for me you represent to a tee the type of 'Catholic' attitude that led to all these abuses in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

I guess your accusations against the Popes of having taught error and/or allowing heresy to be taught has prepared you for your current belief in these propaganda fables. Shame on you for spreading these accusations here without giving the accused any chance of defence or explanation. I suppose the pietistic attitudes that lead to "Irish Jansenism" are not very far away from your current assertions of being established in a vague and sentimental "WWJD" type of "softer" and nicer "Catholic" "faith." You see, neither are based on a solid foundation ; both are based on percolated guilt and shame.

Your refusal to use the words "bastard" and "illegitimate" (which are objective descriptors, in this case objectively true) is evidence of this tendency towards a faith not of objective definitions, measured words, careful reasoning, and temperate behaviour, but one of self-justifying fantasy. You are dressing up your despair in sanctimony and nice-sounding but vain imaginings, like Francis, the nouvelle théologiens, Americanists, liberals, and all the rest of the little Jansenists who excuse their refusal to listen to and understand the Church with the language of a syrupy-sweet "faith" devoid of substance and by trafficking in sweet nothings whispered to oneself and others against strawman meanies.

There's a word for this scandalous behaviour ; it's called "hypocrisy" or else "pharisaism," when somebody exits orthodoxy and pursues a made-up "faith" because they are elevating themselves above the tares in the Church, from whom they are too ready to take scandal. But I guess you've made up your mind to not listen. I suppose you will say that I'm an enabler in denial, despite the fact that my whole point is that the issue is far bigger than you and than your small island.

As for me, I will continue to believe in the God of justice, light, and wisdom, He Who teaches that there is indeed a time for mildness and meekness, but there is also a time for discipline, stern correction, and for hardness against sin. You can't only have one side. You must take both, even if you were scandalised by a report of poor representatives of the one (despite never hearing their explanation and readily taking the word of the enemies of the Church against them without discrimination or mature consideration). After all, the old Church has good fruits. The conciliar Church and its spirit have nothing but rot and filth.

I agree.