WHAT Are We to Make of All This?

By Kevin O'Brien
Waiting for Godot to Leave
June 4, 2014

http://thwordinc.blogspot.com/2014/06/what-are-we-to-make-of-all-this.html

800 dead orphans thrown away in a septic tank by Catholic nuns in Ireland.

As this article reveals, the contempt with which these orphans were treated did not begin the minute they died. The "Home Babies" were ridiculed and ostracized throughout their typically short and miserable lives.

And, apparently, treated with criminal neglect.

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.

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“I do blame the Catholic Church,” says Corless [the historian investigating the home]. “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."

It's a lesson we have yet to learn, for this is a staggering reality.

Elsewhere, writers are pointing out the hypocrisy of pro-life groups that have remained silent on this crime. "Every sperm is sacred, but apparently not every two-year-old, in the world of the Irish Catholic Right," notes Bock the Robber.

And here in America, the bishops continue to behave like racketeers when it comes to sex abuse. In my home town of St. Louis, our archbishop's favorite priest has now been accused for a second time of sex abuse, and the archbishop's response has been to smear the alleged victim's parents with a public press release.

Meanwhile, the Catholic blogosphere implodes and we spend our time fighting with one another over issues that normal people don't even care about.

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One thing we can say for sure. The problem is not Vatican II. The 800 children in this most horrific case of child abuse were tossed into a septic tank by religious sisters who attended the Latin Mass. The 800th dead orphan was discarded before the Council even began. The pot-bellies and malnutrition and social ostracism were happening until 1961, which is within this blogger's lifetime.

The pro-life Catholics who remain silent on this, the bishops who continue to enable the ongoing abuse of children, the apologists for the Church even when the Church is at fault ("my country right or wrong; my mother drunk or sober") - we're all part of the problem.

The Church is right when it diagnoses this problem as the Culture of Death. The Church is wrong when it participates in this very same Culture.

The slaughter of unborn babies, the neglect of born babies, the desecration of dead babies, the eagerness to torture adults, the contempt for the poor, the fervor for war, the zeal to dehumanize others for the sake of profit, the lust for sex without marriage and family - all of these things are symptoms of a great and terrible evil that shows us our desperate need for a Savior, even those of us who live deep within a Church, a Church that sometimes horrifies us.