Posted on 06/11/2014 7:03:49 AM PDT by Renfield
Thank you yet again, Mrs. Don-o. It’s nice to see the other side of the story. I only hope someone who wants to think ill of all Catholics and Catholic institutions will at least try and see the other side. I can only hope and pray.
Not to go too off-topic, I have recently been reading a book about Jewish orphanages in the East End of London in the early 20th Century. Amazing how those children, despite extreme poverty, were very well educated for their class and time, given time for sports and awarded prizes for extra effort. The food was admittedly basic and the worst that happened to them seemed to be that their heads were shaved to prevent lice.
And there ya go. Thank you.
What does not cease to amaze me, is that there are people who show evidence of feeling personally vindicated if Catholics are spotlighted as evil, and personally defeated if it turns out they were innocent.
Amen! Well said to your entire post.
“Not sure if this is related but there was a movie called “sisters of Magdalene” i think, about these nuns in Ireland raising orphan girls... it was horrific!!”
How come we all detest and disbelieve Hollyweird and lamestream media on every issue but this one?
Thank you. Would that the media did half as thorough an investigation!!
“and personally defeated if it turns out they were innocent”
One explanation seems plausible to me.
“room-temperature IQ types”
Room temperature? Dern, how cold do you keep your house?
“http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=24911";
Has that story been posted here, or this one: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393?fb_action_ids=10152435393495560&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ref=.U5NN_0FZ0nU.like&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
These institutions were hell-holes and women living in himes for unwed mothers reported being treated like $&#!, and looked upon as worthless.
This does not jive with the RCC prating that they are oh so holy and all.
This lines up with the Magdalene graves found, but never fully investigated, and with other sites where babies were buried, but the RCC can’t provide proof that any priest could bother to get off his pampered butt and bother himself to perform a baptism for the unfortunate child, nor give him/her a proper burial.
In short, don’t show us your righteousness by chanting in Latin, or shaking an incense container - show it by caring for the least of these.....
I did considerable digging and reading on this. I learned that the Tuam Home run by the Bon Secours sisters did an extraordinary job of saving babies' and children's lives at a time when there were no antibiotics or vaccines, and when TB, pneumonia, influenza and gastroenteritis could wipe out whole wards of vulnerable children, as well as adults in "poor houses" and similar institutions.
The Sisters managed a better than 90% survival rate in their Home, when we know historically that orphanages and foundling homes even in the USA during the pre-antibiotic era could have the horrifyingly opposite result: a 90% death rate. This is not because of abuse or neglect, but the simple facts of life and death when populations were ravaged by infectious childhood diseases.
The best medical advice of the time was that the remains of children who succumbed to these diseases should be buried as soon as possible to prevent the spread of the infection. Hence their interment in vertical shaft graves or crypts, which were common in public institutions throughout the region. The Sisters concentrated their resources on food, soap and clothing for the living, not on caskets, headstones or individual graves for those who died.
And by the way, these children were baptized, since they were given Holy Communion when they were 5, which only Baptized people can receive.
It is crazy that the people now being blamed, trashed and libeled for these children's tragic deaths are in fact the dedicated care-giving women who were the only ones who labored to save them.
Oh, and by the way: the Magdalene Sisters torturing and abusing women in their Laundries? The publication of the Irish government's McAleese Report actually debunked this vicious lie.
(From the McAleese Report, Chapter 19, which describes living and work conditions:)i. Sexual abuse
32. No other women in contact with the Committee made any allegation of sexual abuse during their time in the Magdalen Laundries. However a significant number told the Committee that they had suffered sexual abuse in the family home or in other institutions, either before or after their time in the Magdalen Laundries.
ii. Physical abuse
33. A large majority of the women who shared their stories with the Committee said that they had neither experienced nor seen other girls or women suffer physical abuse in the Magdalen Laundries.
34. In this regard, women who had in their earlier lives been in an industrial or reformatory school drew a clear distinction between their experiences there and in the Magdalen Laundries, stating clearly that the widespread brutality which they had witnessed and been subjected to in industrial and reformatory schools was not a feature of the Magdalen Laundries."
And from Spiked Magazine's Brendan O'Neill (who is unconnected with the Catholic Church: totally non-religious, in fact):
"For the thorough, 1,000-page study found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched."
It is our responsibility --- yours and mine, Laissez-faire --- to help make amends for the slanders which have been circulated about these good Sisters with scant evidence, with no evidence, and against the evidence.
Which is disingenuous in the extreme. Privately run perhaps but funded via the Government through its constitutional escalation of the Catholic Church at the time. I would refer you to my great-aunt, still living, if she weren’t so badly damaged by her years at the hands of the Holy Sisters.
Hello to you all by the way.
Cathy.
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