Religion
In reply to the discussion: Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story [View all]struggle4progress
(126,683 posts)Kevin Clarke | Jun 18 2014 - 12:27pm
Babies born inside the institutions were denied baptism and, if they died from the illness and disease rife in such facilities, also denied a Christian burial. It is a sentence, unattributed to any source, which repeats either word for word or in a close approximation in hundreds of articles concerning the .. children in Tuam, Galway between 1925 and 1961. This appalling sacramental indifference is referenced in major U.S. and U.K. publications and cited in leading online opinion journals like Salon as more evidence of the cruelty of the Bon Secours sisters who ran the home and the Catholic Church in Ireland in general ...
Father Fintan Monahan, Tuams diocesan secretary, told me this morning that the diocese has in its records thousands of baptismal certificates for the children that were born or brought into the home in Tuam. Beyond that physical evidence of the baptismal record, he asked the diocesan archivist to look further into the issue to see if any evidence of a past policy to refuse to baptize children born out of wedlock could be teased out of the diocesan archives. We can find no evidence that it was ever the policy, he reports
Beyond that, as a priest, he has never heard of such a refusal. It is not a normal practice in Tuam today, he says, or anywhere he can think of in Ireland, and it would not have been a normal practice <to deny baptism in the past,> he says ...
Monahan can only speculate, of course, and perhaps there has been enough speculation on this matter as it is, that journalists may have heard stories of individual priests who may have resisted baptizing children who were born to unmarried women and drawn the wrong conclusions from such anecdotes. That of course does not excuse or explain the legions of journalists who have replayed this sentence (or a variation of it), without citation, over and over and over again ...
http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/galway-horror-part-ii