I have a cousin to whom I had been explaining how Roman Catholicism in Ireland is going through a crisis. The hypocrisy that underlay Bishop Casey’s love affair and then the problem he had in fully acknowledging and supporting his son may have been a starting point for many on this green island.
The protection of paedophile priests by the clergy up to the level of Abbot Kevin Smith and Cardinal Desmond O’Connell and the lack of support for their victims was another huge saga that alienated more and more of both the faithful and the secular in Ireland.
Another huge scandal that has become more and more apparent is how “Industrial Schools” and “Mother and Baby Homes” run by religious orders of Nuns operated both before and then for the most part of the 20th Century. The fire in Cavan that killed 35 girls and one adult in 1943 was bad enough in itself but the truth about how the children lived from day to day and the circumstances of their deaths was suppressed for a very long time.
The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland became an object of review in 1993 when a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. In the past 20 years or so it has become abundantly clear that the “fallen women” kept in these institutions were mistreated and used as slave labour. The last of these institutions was only closed in 1996.
The latest scandal is that of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, where “significant numbers” of infant corpses (from premature to 3 years old) have been found following research by a historian who found a
discrepancy between approximately 800 death certificates issued and the number of official burials in the town. The investigation into this is on-going. There will also be a review of all the other similar homes that operated in Ireland with some saying thousands of bodies are yet to be discovered in the country as a whole.
After I had related some of the above to my cousin, she retorted “it is lies; it is fake news”. I was simply astounded to hear this but I looked up ‘Tuam Fake News’ on Google to discover the almost certain source as the American president of the Catholic League. I am sorely afraid that it his statement that is fake. Respectable politicians, the mainstream press and the public in Ireland do not doubt that some very disturbing things happened in association with these homes and that it relates to a very sad and scandalous episode that has been kept largely hidden from the public view for too long.
In this day and age of social media and information technology it may be ironic that it is so hard to tell fact from fiction, real from virtual and lies from truth. Whatever the truth about the actual numbers interred in Tuam, what is quite clear from interviews with living survivors (both children and mothers) was that to be kept in such “caring” institutions was an almost complete misery. The death rates were much higher than the national average; the children were marched to school, en bloc, and kept segregated from the other children before being marched back to the home again; the mothers were encouraged to have the children adopted and even encouraged to give them names that would be most attractive to potential adopters.
The general attitude towards such mothers was made clear to me by a story recently told to me by a close friend. Her aunt had had a neighbour who was not the most intelligent of girls but who, after she became pregnant, asked her if she could live with her along with her new born child and that in return she would work for her for nothing. The parish priest heard of this and said it was impossible and that she must go into one of these homes. Subsequently, after the birth of the baby, the young mother wrote to my friend’s aunt asking again if she and her baby could live with her. The aunt was quite happy to do so but again the priest intervened. He was furious saying that it would be a complete scandal to have such a woman and her baby living in the parish. In the end the girl came home but never saw her child again. This was not a million years ago but it is just one real case that I know about personally and that shows the total lack of humanity and the total abuse of power of such clerics.
For sure, something is rotten in the current state of Catholicism in both Ireland and the Vatican. Pope Francis set up a “Commission into the Protection of Minors” to which one of the victims, Marie Collins, was appointed. The inaction by this commission has resulted in her resignation from it in protest. It seems that even the Pope cannot overcome the entrenched, retrograde and reactionary position taken by the Vatican elite.
The title of this essay is taken from a face to face interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russel after he was asked what message he would offer to people living a thousand years hence. It is of an additional relevance to me because just before my cousin told me that Tuam was false news she had stated that “God is Love” and I had added Bertrand Russel’s statement that “Love is Wise”. His full reply goes like this:
I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:
The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.