I commend Tim Stanley's blog post What happened at the Tuam children's home was a human tragedy, not a Catholic one.
It is good that the reality is coming out now but the Catholic Church bashing headlines have already done their damage.
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The prevailing wisdom is that Catholicism can be dangerous to the society if it is allowed total influence over a society. Even amoung faithful, church-going Catholics, I find the virtually universal belief that we cannot allow the Church to taint our economic and political systems. Those of us who believe in social teachings of the Church and the Kingship of Christ have absolutely lost control of the narrative. This has been going on for a very long time. White, Protestant, Capitalist, Whigism is the best political/economic system for the common good of society. This is more than just conventional wisdom. This is the absolute worldview. Catholicism, even if one holds it to be the true religion, must be tempered by White Northern European Protestantism or else we will all be come dark-skinned slackers, living off the government dole.
"Evangelii Gaudium" was a good start to reclaiming the truth. But we need an army of Chestertons to reclaim the narrative. The amount of resources and effort that has gone into Catholic apologetics needs to be matched in the effort to go on the offensive against Americanist/English economics. The battlefield is historical narrative of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Instead of fighting an unwinable defense strategy against the anti-Catholic slanders of the 19th and 20th Centuries, we need to put the Whigs on the defense and attack.
Dr Tim is very good at putting things right,he has a good column in The Daily Telegraph which I read regularly; I don't take much notice of the rest of the garbage as I only really buy it for the crossword & racing page
The non-story and its amazingly-widespread distribution was part of the ongoing anti-Catholic, anti-family, anti-life propaganda output, the producers of which has a very active cohort in the so-called "Media" in Ireland. This disgusting slop is daily output in Ireland - this one was also directed further afield. It's depressing how many people continue to accept this stuff as "news". The Church in Ireland gave up teaching the truths of the Faith, and of human nature decades ago and most of the leaders work against the Faith. Blessed Michael, the Archangel defend us in battle . . .
Well said George.
Chesterton is fortunately becoming more read. Cobbett's Letters are also an interesting read in this regard, especially since he was a Protestant seeing the value and necessity of the Catholic Church for a healthy society. He noted that:
"in England, the Church was the very basis of the laws. The very first clause of MAGNA CHARTA provided for the stability of its property and rights. A provision for the indigent, an effectual provision, was made by the laws that related to the Church and its property; and this was not the case in France; and never was the case in any country but this: so that the English people lost more by a "Reformation" than any other people could have lost."
For anyone interested, the quote from Cobbett's work that I gave is part of paragraph 462, Letter XVI. His letters are online at http://www.exclassics.com/protref/protbibl.htm
Some more links to help flesh out what happened at Tuam.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/what_is_the_real_story_behind_irelands_mass_grave
http://carolinefarrow.com/2014/06/04/tuam-childrens-home-salting-the-earth/
http://carolinefarrow.com/2014/06/07/tuam-breaking-800-babies-were-not-dumped/
I remember reading an essay by GK Chesterton about how the English found it necessary to denigrate Irish culture and anything Irish in order to justify their treatment of the Irish over the centuries. Part of that culture was the Catholic Church and the fact that the religion of the English is anti-Catholicism this just served to reinforce it.
If the home had been run by people of deviant sexual orientations, the government, the socialist party no one would be drawing a connection there. In fact, it's unlikely it would get much coverage at all.
The vicious, slanted reporting which goes on in this world is not only aimed at the Catholic Church. We have a conservative government in Australia led by a Catholic Prime Minister, Tony Abbott (although I am more than a bit suspicious about his Catholicism). The attacks on him and his family have been unrelenting here because the media are almost, to a man (and certainly, to a woman), completely left-wing socialists. The hatred spewed out against Tony Abbott is almost unbelievable. The ABC, our national broadcaster, is chock full of socialist "media" types which our Universities churn out in droves. I must say that "Media Studies" is one of the very easiest Mickey Mouse options which so many of our young go after, simply because a subject, like my own, of Mathematics, requires real hard work in studying!
The results are there for anyone to see, if they have a mind which actually thinks, instead of simply following the crowd. Hence the media bias against truth and common sense.
Isn't it amazing how those who condone the intentional deaths of infants (abortion) carry on as if terribly aggrieved at the unintentional deaths of infants and small children in a Catholic institution. It's worse than hypocrisy; it's blind anti-Catholicism because these people won't examine the facts. Perhaps they won't examine the facts because they won't examine their consciences, and they won't examine their consciences because they don't want to face the truth that they urgently need the Sacrament of Penance. Hence, it's all or nothing: embrace the Church or do one's best to destroy it so it doesn't bother one's conscience again.
Spiritual blindness and hatred for the Church caused by hiding from the truth will presumably bring more persecution of the Faithful as the purposeful killing of children and other evils increase. In the last 6 months alone, based on WHO statistics, there have been approximately 20,000,000 infants killed by abortion world-wide. Where is the expression of outrage by the UN and the media and their sycophants for all these intended infant deaths? The Australian government contributes to these figures by funding abortion via medicare, killing about 1,000,000 infant Australians each year. Sadly Australia's supposedly Catholic PM Tony Abbott "pledged to make no changes to abortion law before becoming Prime Minister" (Wikipedia).
@ JARay, I too am more than a bit suspicious of our PM (Abbott)'s Catholicism. Perhaps he used it to win the Catholic vote and the media actually took him seriously. Even though he has not supported Catholic issues since taking the reins of government the media may think he might if push came to shove in the future. One can only hope and pray that he would.
The case should be very clear that English politics and economics directly lead to the deaths of millions of Irish. But it's not. In fact, Catholics (such as Tom Woods and other popular Catholics, clergy and non) make the case for English economics and even directly absolve London of its Malthusian, Whigist policies of death.
As an integral part of Pentecost yesterday, we made a procession to our Ukrainian Catholic parish cemetery to offer prayers for those buried there and elsewhere. Afterward, as conversation among some of us turned toward matters of maintenance, older members of the parish council pointed out that there is one corner of the small property for which we no longer have records or markers but know that a number of people were buried there. And that is consecrated ground under continuous ownership and our parish celebrates only its 100th anniversary this year.
Regarding the Tuam mother and baby home, really the fact is that there was no "mass grave." Twenty-two burials per year for 36 years equal individual graves. Both the time line and the eye-witness account indicate that they could not have been "dumped" in the septic tank. The presence of approximately 20 skeletons there is a matter for forensic archeology before conclusions are jumped to. In 1967 the United Church of Canada congregation I grew up in had a centennial project to secure the river bank in their cemetery because long-forgotten graves were being eroded and remains exposed. Whether children were buried in the septic tank in Tuam or not is indeed important. Even if they were, though, further questions have to be researched regarding individual responsibility and circumstances before a group characterization is made and reported as an aspersion.
During high school I grew up in Chatham, an Irish-Catholic town at the mouth of the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. Since then, Middle Island there has been developed into a park:
“Middle Island was used as a quarantine station when, in 1847, typhus and scarlet fever spread throughout the ship Looshtauk as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Of the 462 passengers on board, at least 146 people died en route and 96 died while in quarantine. Initially those who died on the island were buried in caskets, but as the death toll continued to rise personal resting places could no longer be an option. This resulted in large mass graves being placed on the island. Some of these graves were discovered as recently as 1996.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramichi,_New_Brunswick... )
Last week I accompanied a friend on the day his wife's grave marker was installed at Brookside Cemetery here in Winnipeg. She is buried in the free "welfare" section. Most people buried there do not have markers of any kind, much less "permanent" stone ones.
What has happened with this story is shameful. Media outlets have taken the story of a woman doing the time-consuming and personally expensive work that our parish council or countless others eventually have to do and turned it into innuendo.
A superb article by Brendan O'Neill on the subject.
Largely a media hoax, as one might have expected:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/06/09/that-story-about-irish-babies-in-a-septic-tank-is-a-media-hoax/
Funny how even Catholic Bishops will believe fake news about the scandals within the Church, but we've been so effectively trained to ignore the real scandals in the Church. It reminds me of when the John Jay report on the priestly scandal came out in the U.S. You got the sense that many of the clergy were willingly going along with the "priests are pedophiles" storyline, so they could deny what the evidence actually showed: that the vast majority of abuse targeted adolescent and post-pubescent boys. In other words, it revealed the extent to which deviant homosexuals were receiving cover from the hierarchy. Better to admit to pedophilia than to have to deal publicly with the fact that many within the hierarchy had very "progressive" views about sexuality, or to have an actual debate about the fitness of homosexual men to serve as priests and to be placed in charge of boys (male doctors are often chaperoned during inspections of females, so let's not try and pretend this is shocking homophobia).
What we all "know"--true or not--is that Catholics in the past were really bad, that we are better, and that our trouble evangelizing is not our own cowardice, but the roadblocks that their badness has erected.
Here's a good article by Victoria White, though I don't agree with everything in it.
here's another superb article by that same author
RTE journalist Philip Boucher Hayes has new anecdotal evidence that the babies weren't buried in a septic tank
http://philipboucher-hayes.com/2014/06/12/tuam-new-understanding
Also here's an excellent article by David Quinn:
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-quinn/single-mothers-were-forcibly-sterilised-in-sweden-we-dont-hear-much-about-that-30351488.html#sthash.Xs2sCzfA.uxfs
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