The Communion of Saints

The Communion of Saints
I hope there's room for me.

Welcome all - especially Mancunians.

Hello anybody lost in the blogosphere. Welcome to the ruminations of a politically left of centre, Man United supporting, blues loving, history-fixated, Catholic wanderer. Be warned, I am a bit of a curmudgeon.



Sunday 22 June 2014

The Tuam septic tank story continues to crumble.

Of some interest, I hope, to those who have been baffled by the whole "Nuns and septic tank story":
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2014/06/associated-press-apologizes-for-its-coverage-of-the-irish-orphanage-story/#
This has never been true, will the major press sites now retract their claims and will all those people who have made dishonest hay out of this admit they have, at the very least, jumped the gun a bit?
The interesting part reads:

DUBLIN (AP) — In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.

Thursday 12 June 2014

The true story continues to emerge.....

Another response to the "Babies in Septic Tank" story. This whole sorry saga and the lack of any sort of media standards in reporting it is shameful, if unsurprising.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-tuam-tank-another-myth-about-evil-ireland/15140#.U5lX3Ja9LCR

Wednesday 11 June 2014

The Nuns, the children's home and the septic tank.

Across the world, aided by social media, a story has been hitting the headlines and been hyped in the most bizarre and unbelievable ways.
If you believe what is being said, 796 babies' bodies were buried in a septic tank in the grounds of a home for unmarried mothers by the Bon Secours sister who ran the home in Tuam, County Galway, Eire, between 1925 and 1961. You will also believe that these children's deaths are suspicious.
I agree that it is appalling the way that unmarried mothers were treated and the terrible ways in which their children were treated by the wider community, let alone within homes, is a deep shame. Does this mean we are to believe that these nuns were a group of mass murderers?
I ask it as starkly as that because I have been fairly stunned by what I have read - one person asked me whether I would be changing the Catholic part of my moniker in the light of "the burial in a septic tank without Christian ceremony of 796 children of unmarried mothers who died of neglect while supposedly in the care of the Catholic Church in Ireland." This was the first I had heard of this story and I declined to comment without more knowledge.
I then saw a comment of Facebook by someone saying he would "punch a nun in the face" if he saw one due to this story and then, what has lead me to post today, is that a respected Cornish politician tweeted the headline "Nuns and mass murder, still getting my head around this crime against humanity".
Because of this, I finally joined twitter today and tweeted her the foregoing article by a respected journalist which has been in the public domain for a few days but seems not to have stemmed the tide of hyperbole, disinformation and hysteria. It makes clear that the bodies of 796 babies were not found in a septic tank, it reveals that the deaths were all registered by the home - which is how the figure of 796 was reached, due to the death certificates issued - and that as shocking as the number of deaths is, it was not so unexpected in a crowded home in the west of Ireland at that time. It is an awful and depressing tale, but it is not Rwanda and is not just to those who have worked to make sure that the children are remembered.
I urge others to read it, share it, tweet it, explain it - this is not a defence of the way that we treated umarried mothers and their children, it is a plea for truth and request that we stop buying into media inspired hysteria.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393