The idea of consecrated women being malevolent hypocrites is too sensational for the media to resist.
Every few years, there is a moral panic about nuns or other religious orders. The government of Ireland is now digging up the graves of children in Tuam, where there once was a “mother and baby” home run by the Bons Secours order. Back in 2014, researcher Catherine Corless found death certificates for 796 children from between 1925 and 1961, but almost no burial records. She inferred that many were buried on the site, possibly in a sewage tank.
The 2014 story, by the Irish Mail on Sunday, that a mass grave of 800 babies was on-site was read around the world. The Washington Post and others reported that the 800 bodies had been “found.” The verb “dumped” was used constantly. Then Taoiseach Enda Kenny called the site a “chamber of horrors.” Now there is a film coming out, The Lost Children of Tuam. The impression from media coverage and from a lot of sensational reposting is that the nuns were villains who denied children medical attention, food, and ultimately burial for the sin of being born outside marriages.
If this sounds a lot like the panic about mass graves at Catholic schools for Native Americans in Canada, it’s because it is. I highly recommend David Quinn’s piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, which was written after more bodies were dug up — although few Irish outlets bothered to note that they were in coffins. Nobody seems to have asked why nuns would bother opening a home for mothers and babies if they hated them so much. Was it just to torture people? The mind boggles. The infant mortality rate was appalling in postindependence Ireland, particularly in state-run institutions. But the idea of consecrated women being malevolent hypocrites — at once punishing women and babies for their sins and ignoring their church’s mandate for a decent Christian burial — made the story too sensational.
The Irish state’s own 2021 inquiry into the Tuam mother-and-baby homes is sobering. What the inquiry found is that the Galway County Council — a government body — placed both unwed and wed mothers there for care if they were poor and needful. The Bon Secours were regularly overwhelmed by the number of people they had to care for in close quarters, and the Galway County Council routinely underfunded the institution and denied sisters’ requests for more resources. After a 1947 visit to the home, government inspector Alice Litster said the nuns were “careful and attentive” to the girls’ needs. The official reporting indicates that many women, whether desperately poor or trying to hide their pregnancy from Irish society, came into the home severely malnourished.
The fact is that Irish society under the pressure of poverty could be spectacularly cruel in its moralizing. It often protected the reputation of men — then the breadwinners — at the expense of unwed women and babies. Respectability was an economic resource. A similar impulse is at work now, trying to transfer the moral shame and blame for the conditions at Tuam to the only people working diligently to improve the situation. Women ended up in these homes often because their own families turned them out and rejected them. Protestant homes like Bethany Home, at the same time, had similar mortality rates.
The lineage of lurid tales about nuns goes a long way back. Thomas Cromwell produced lurid inventories about monasteries and abbeys to justify their dissolution. Gothic novels like The Monk or Diderot’s Religieuse attacked religious orders in this way. The Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., was burned down in 1834. Publications like the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk confected stories about babies being born to nuns, baptized, then smothered and thrown into a pit in the cellar.