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The Lost Children of Tuam?
I am an old man now haunted by the past of the loss of a daughter aged 19 years and one week (she would have been 52 years old this May 2020), as well as the loss of five of my siblings (3 brothers and two sisters). A pain that never goes away. There is always something painful that I read, that reminds me of the hurt I still feel of losing our Sal. Even on Disqus and other blogs sites that I partake in discussions bring tears to my eyes, especially where children are concerned.
Today, I see religion, especially Christianity as an enemy of children. Why I say today, clerical abuse and sexual abuse of children has been documented by the church since at least 306 CE. That abuse is still ongoing in one form or another 1,700 years or more since the Synod of Elvira corroborated such abuse!
The western world has seen the inhumanity of a Theocracy, of how the Papacy treated its people and kept them in virtual serfdom and ignorance of the outside world for more than 1,100 years. Their anti-humanitarianism has also brought them to the forefront of people’s attention, from children’s homes to workhouses to care homes for the unwed mothers all run by priests or Nuns.
It should also be said that both Catholic and Protestant homes for Children around the world from Ireland to Canada, America to Australia children have suffered under the name of the Christian God!
What has prompted this post is a New York Times article written by Dan Barry dated Oct. 28, 2017, heading The Lost Children of Tuam. Tuam (pronounced Chewm) is a town in Galway the west of Ireland, the article which is well written and based on the findings of a local amateur historian 63-year-old Catherine Corless, née Farrell. She is a grandmother with a smile not easily given, and any fealty to Catholicism long since lost. True, she occasionally volunteers to paint the weathered statues outside the local country churches: the blue of the Blessed Virgin eyes, the bronze in St. Patrick’s beard. But this is for the community, not the church.
The story, based on her search for the truth of what happened to the lost children from St. Mary Mother and Baby Home. A care home for single mothers run by Bon Secours order of Nuns, whose motto: Good Help to Those in Need. It was a way station for 50 single mothers and 125 children born out of wedlock.
I am not embarrassed to say I cried reading the article and I have tears in my eyes writing this post.
The rest of this post will be extracts in the form of quotes from this news article. Sorry, it is a bit long and I hope you will take the time to read through the link.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html
“One day, a few years back, Catherine began to inquire about the old home that had stoked her schoolgirl imagination. She set out on an amateur’s historical quest, but whenever she focused on the children who lived there, so many questions arose about the children who died there — the ones who never made it to the classroom, or even past infancy.”
“The government repurposed the building to be among the institutions intended as ports of salvation where disgraced women might be redeemed. These state-financed homes were invariably managed by a Catholic order, in keeping with the hand-in-glove relationship between the dominant church and the fledgeling state.”
One inmate recalls “You rose early and went down to the nursery with your infant. Mass at 8, then porridge and tea for breakfast. Breastfeeding next, after which you rinsed your child’s diapers before moving on to your daily drudgery. You might polish the dormitory floors with beeswax or clean bedsheets stained with urine. “An awful lonely ould hole,” recalled Julia Carter Devaney.”
“The sisters frequently threatened banishment to the mental asylum in Ballinasloe, or to one of the Magdalen Laundries: institutions where women perceived to be susceptible or errant — including “second offenders” who had become pregnant again — were often sent to work, and sometimes die, in guilt-ridden servitude.”
“Typical is the story of one unmarried woman who had been sent to the home from a remote Galway farm. Determined to remain close to her child, she took a job as a cleaner at a nearby hospital and, for several years, she appeared at the home’s door on her day off every week to say the same thing:
That’s my son you have in there. I want my son. I want to rear him.
No, would come the answer. And the door would close.
For the children left behind, there were swings and seesaws and donated Christmas gifts from town, but no grandparents and cousins coming around to coo. They lived amid the absence of affection and the ever-present threat of infectious disease. “Like chickens in a coop.”
Many survivors have only the sketchiest memories of those days, a haze of bed-wetting and rocking oneself to sleep. One man, now in his 70s, remembers being taken for a walk with other home babies, and the excitement of seeing themselves in the side-view mirrors of parked cars.
“We didn’t even know it was a reflection of ourselves in the mirror,” he recalled. “And we were laughing at ourselves. Laughing.”
Until they were adopted, sent to a training school or boarded out to a family, the older children walked to one of the two primary schools along the Dublin Road, some of them calling out “daddy” and “mammy” to strangers in the street. Shabby and betraying signs of neglect, they sat at the back of the classroom, apart.
“I never remember them really being taught,” Catherine said. “They were just there.”
Now, 40 years later, here was Catherine Corless, amateur historian, trying to unearth that truth, applying what she had learned in her community centre research class: Use “why” a lot.
When her headaches and panic attacks eased, she pored over old newspapers in a blur of microfilm. She spent hours studying historic maps in the special collections department of the library at the national university in Galway City. One day she copied a modern map of Tuam on tracing paper and placed it over a town map from 1890.
And there it was, in the cartographic details from another time: A tank for the home’s old septic system sat precisely where the two boys had made their ghastly discovery. It was part of the Victorian-era system’s warren of tunnels and chambers, all of which had been disconnected in the late 1930s.
Did this mean, then, that the two lads had stumbled upon the bones of home babies? Buried in an old sewage area?
“I couldn’t understand it,” Catherine said. “The horror of the idea.”
Acting on instinct, she purchased a random sample from the government of 200 death certificates for children who had died at the home. Then, sitting at the Tuam cemetery’s edge in the van of its caretaker, she checked those death certificates against all the burials recorded by hand in two oversize books.
Only two children from the home had been buried in the town graveyard. Both were orphans, both “legitimate.”
Neither the Bon Secours order nor the county council could explain the absence of burial records for home babies, although it was suggested that relatives had probably claimed the bodies to bury in their own family plots. Given the ostracizing stigma attached at the time to illegitimacy, Catherine found this absurd.
In December 2012, Catherine’s essay, titled “The Home,” appeared in the historical journal of Tuam. After providing a general history of the facility, it laid out the results of her research, including the missing burial records and the disused septic tank where two boys had stumbled upon some bones.
“Is it possible that a large number of those little children were buried in that little plot at the rear of the former Home?” she wrote. “And if so, why is it not acknowledged as a proper cemetery?”
I have omitted the teasing and bullying that these Home children (as they were called by the locals) received for local children including Catherine herself, who is now haunted by their past.
For Catherine and her 40-year search for the truth of what happened to the “Lost Children of Tuam” and the girls that endured hardship and loss at the hands of their supposed saviours.
What do you say, does religion harm children?
Cofion
Jero Jones
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/