Correction: Ireland-Children's Mass Graves story

By Shawn Pogatchnik
Miami Herald
June 21, 2014

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/08/4166145/catholic-leader-seeks-irish-probe.html

FILE- In this Thursday, May 10, 2012 file photo, Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin attends a press conference, at the Vatican. A senior Catholic Church figure says Ireland’s government should establish a fact-finding probe into the church’s mistreatment and burial of babies that died in nun-operated homes for unmarried mothers. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made his appeal Sunday following revelations that hundreds of children who died inside a former church residence for children born out of wedlock were buried in unmarked graves at the site. A researcher found records showing that 796 children, mostly infants, died at the home in Tuam, County Galway, from its 1925 opening to its 1962 closure. Local residents suspect they were interred in a nearby field, including in a disused septic tank. Martin said Ireland should investigate why so many children died in several long-closed homes for unwed mothers and how they were buried. Andrew Medichini,

DUBLIN -- In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.