The facts not in dispute:
* 796 dead infants
* Shamed mothers (because of religious attitudes) in the care of nuns who were overworked and malnourished
* Infant mortality at a rate much higher than the general population
Facts in dispute:
* Were the infants' bodies "buried in a mass grave" or "dumped in a septic tank"
Thus we must not judge ANYTHING about this story. Certainly not whether religious teachings or attitudes had anything to do with it.
It reminds me of the whole Dan Rather/"Times Roman font" bullshit during the 2004 election. The disturbing facts of the story were made secondary to a trivial detail, thus enabling the dismissal of the truth.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/3/irish-church-underfireoverchildrensmassgrave.html
A 1944 government inspection recorded evidence of malnutrition among some of the 271 children then living in the Tuam orphanage alongside 61 unwed mothers. The death records cite sicknesses, diseases, deformities and premature births as causes of death.
Elderly locals recalled that the children attended a local school — but were segregated from other pupils and routinely bullied — until they were adopted or placed, around age 7 or 8, into church-run industrial schools that featured unpaid labor and abuse. In keeping with Catholic teaching, such out-of-wedlock children were denied baptism and, if they died at such facilities, Christian burial.
It is well documented that throughout Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, church-run orphanages and workhouses often buried their dead in unmarked graves and unconsecrated ground, reflecting how unmarried mothers — derided as "fallen women" in the culture of the day — typically were ostracized by society and their own families.
Records indicate that the former Tuam workhouse's septic tank was converted specifically to serve as the body disposal site for the orphanage.
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