"Significant" numbers of babies remains actually found

minibear wrote: »

The nuns will probably eventually "remember" that a priest actually officiated at interments into this pit/tomb/septic tank.
I really do hope that there will be a lot less than 800 remains in the site, because the babies were worth so much more as adoptees to be "sold". The nuns were running a business and it was all about profit so we can only hope that they looked after their interests.

Is it known how many different doctors were involved on the death certs?
is it known what kind of testing is planned on the remains?
If they've already done C14 dating on some of the bones, do they intend to date them all and will they DNA test them so that each individual can be reinterred?
The religious orders bank accounts should be frozen and the money taken from them to pay for this testing and their re-burial and the headstones for every single child buried there.

I think it's difficult for some people to appreciate the grip that the church had on this country at times. In the 1930's my father in law's mother died when he was a child. His father wanted to keep the children and raise them himself but they were forcibly taken from the home and put into various institutions around the country. My father in law ended up in Letterfrack but was lucky enough at age fourteen to be sent to work for a farmer who treated him like his own child. He was friends with another child in Letterfrack who, after some minor misdemeanour was beaten so badly he died. They claimed he died from TB. Yet after all this, my father in law still can't understand why we won't baptise our daughter. He buys The Irish Catholic (i find it fairly poor fodder for lighting a fire) and he goes to mass when he can.

If you can bear it, "Song of a Raggedy Boy" is on youtube.

Many of the orders have already feathered their nests with brand new purpose built retirement homes costing millions. And when they are allgon under Canon Law their money and property will go to Rome not Ireland.

I have no quarrel with anyone going to mass. or believing. The problem is that those who abused were not following the teachings

Interesting many of the leading Nazis went to Mass also. Anyone can go to mass.

Doing so in deep faith is a great thing.I envy him.

infogiver wrote: »

But undertakers have to be paid and graves purchased. The CoCo were paying for the keep of the girls and their babies, were they going to pay for the funeral arrangements too?

No they don't. They had land. As we see. Undertakers for what? To lay the bodies out? To this day, Sisters lay out their own dead.

What arrangements? They had gardeners, field hands to dig the graves. Tiny graves too.

And the Orders had money

The Bon Secours? They buried I think 12 of their sisters there, and when they moved, they exhumed them and reburied them and a fine monument erected

Now THAT cost..That really cost.

So they walked away, nb with the profit from the sale of that land, leaving nearly 800 little ones like that?

ceadaoin. wrote: »

I didn't know that, it's quite shocking. A lot of older people probably left school early and that might skew the figures somewhat?

That's besides the point though because these institutions were paid by the government to raise and educate these children. If this girl was unable to read after 16 years in their care then that says a lot.

Well, look at who created the education system here?

Literacy also has always been low priority in farming circles.

My previous 2 rural landlords were illiterate. The first could barely sign his own name. Yet he was the richest man in the county. Buitl each of his family mansions;cattle famer.

The second could barely read. I think he was dyslexic, undiagnosed. Again a farmer

They were taken out of school early to work on the farm

Wompa1 wrote: »

Can't be true for all BUT women who committed to celibacy to become a nun, who obviously would never have children of their own were to care for other people's children. How many didn't want their own children because they didn't have the desire to be a mother? Imagine not wanting kids, having no feeling toward them and then being surrounded by children who need attention the most....

Can we distinguish here please , between monastic celibacy in eg the Poor Clares, and what happened with these conscripts?

Monastic celibacy is a chosen thing, carefully monitored and trained. It is to give all of yourself to Jesus without the ties of children etc. A positive not negative.

The Church calls only the enclosed contemplative orders "Nuns" : the other eg Mercies, are Religious Sisters.

Most of the Sisters in these times were conscripted. And did nto see choice as we do ..

In neither case though would there necessarily be the lack of maternal feelings . Often far from it.

But they had no training. No idea. and were bound by Obedience.

Samaris wrote: »

Well, given money was expected (£100) for "caring" for these women and children (if the woman could not afford this fee, she worked it off in the convent), plus the money from adoptions, plus any tithe money or donation money, I am sure that somewhere in there, there would have been the cash to ensure that a child wasn't dying every fortnight for the entire length of the places opening. (Yes, I am sure that it didn't actually work out like that, some probably died in waves. That makes it all better, doesn't it). I think there would also have been the money to dig a series of graves with even one headstone commemorating that nearly eight hundred children lay there.

I rather suspect that yes, if the effort had been made, it could have been done.

I suspect that "conscription" answers both of these. Many women did become nuns because their families felt that having a child in the ministry (priest for preference, but nun also respected) was essential for social standing. It was also a useful solution for women who hadn't managed to catch a husband and was thus a drain on the family's finances. On top of that, you appear to have had a very heirarchial structure where wealth and breeding told. So two sets of religieuses, the lesser of which did the heavy work. It was controlled absolutely by the Mother Superior and if she was a decent woman, it probably ticked along okay. If she wasn't...

If you were taken from your family and put to work somewhere at an early age with a hundred and one rules to follow, imprisoned in a convent and literally the only people lower than you were the wretched women who come in having broken the laws of the land (well, the laws of religion) to which you are expected to be devoted, and there's so many of them.. Yes, I can see how either a passive woman whose had all the spirit taken out of her or a frustrated, resentful woman, would either obey absolutely and trust to God's will (remembering that Obedience was one of the top three rules), or take out their anger on these people who are actually below her on the pecking order.

On top of that, the whole business is enforced by the senior nuns, the Mother Superior AND the State outside. And you have nowhere to go as an exiled nun.

It doesn't excuse it. But it might explain it.

That is a bleak and thankfully outtdated view of religious life samaris.

IIt can be and often is a joyous and fruitful giving of self to God, but that applies more to the enclosed and contemplative orders.

Thankfully it has returned to being that for the few who enter. A way oflife like no other

What happened here in the wake of the decision by Rome after the famine was a travesti of that holy life.

The church was set on large numbers in the priesthood and active religious sisters. As large as could be.

It all hinges on that campaign; look up Paul Cardinal Cullen and read this clearly

I used the word conscription as opposed to vocation.

When you have ten children and the priest and two sisters are at your door asking which of your children you were giving to God? They were well dressed, well fed, clean and offering a permanent home and food etc to some of the brood clamouring for food....

Like the old "join the navy and see the world" campaigns.

There would have been some for whom it was a blessing

Oh and they took them in from 15 onwards by the way. Later that got raised to 18 lower limit.

Back street young women, , tough and grateful. A safe place to live and work, which it was.

Holy Obedience again is a fine and lovely thing, in the right hands, and in the enclosed orders it worked well.
But it is also the most easily abused of the Vows.

And yet there is in the Irish temperament a willingness to cave in to authority? Wonder how far that goes back.

I am explaining here that i have a special interest here. As a highly qualified academic specialising in monastic and ecclesiastic history and life I came to Ireland with a new book ( my 5th) on the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early decades of the 21st century commissioned.

As I was and am also living the solitary life that has always been valued within the church, I was welcomed and doors opened.

During the years I lived in parishes, talked in depth to priests, visited orders.

That was just before it all started; the abuse revelations.

The first was Goldenbridge. A good neighbour then had a sister in the Mercies; Their excuse was no money and that was when I started to wonder.

Then people started seeking me out to tell their experiences... unimaginable suffering

And from then to now. Every order, every diocese. Every planned chapter scrapped.

Needless to say there will be no book now.

I knew a long while ago re the babies. A relief that it is in the open now . And there is far more to come. Knew re the seminaries too.

I have met some wonderful nuns and priests along the way. I lived years near a Poor Clare convent. Good holy women of deep faith and compassion and helpless against what was happening. True religious life. Priests just home from eg Africa, bewildered at what they found here.

I believe in religious life. What happened in the earlier years was not that.

Hence the word conscription. The women had little choice between joining and living on the streets.

To see a whole convent of habited women in procession was an amazing and moving sight.

Now almost all gone.

One of the first Mercy Sisters I ever met explained.. " we were called into being to establish hospitals and schools. Now the State has taken that over and we have an ageing population of sisters to care for and that is a work in itself "

A crying shame they damaged so many vulnerable ones on the way