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Jon Stewart Sends Noah Haters Back To Bible School

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/tregza/haters-of-the-lost-ark

Mad Max wrote:

Jon Stewart Sends Noah Haters Back To Bible School

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/tregza/haters-of-the-lost-ark

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers



In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high.

“If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”

Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.”

According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. “If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies,” she said. She said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift.

“When the child opened it, she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless told Irish Central. “Of course, I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time…. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.”

She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals wanted to “forget,” when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there?

So she requested the records through the local registration house to find out. The attendant “came back a couple of weeks later and said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children,” Corless said.

Once, in 1995, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of concrete: “The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.”

Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/03/bodies-of-800-babies-long-dead-found-in-septic-tank-at-former-irish-home-for-unwed-mothers/

Mad Max wrote:

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers



In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high.

“If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”

Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.”

According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. “If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies,” she said. She said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift.

“When the child opened it, she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless told Irish Central. “Of course, I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time…. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.”

She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals wanted to “forget,” when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there?

So she requested the records through the local registration house to find out. The attendant “came back a couple of weeks later and said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children,” Corless said.

Once, in 1995, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of concrete: “The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.”

Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/03/bodies-of-800-babies-long-dead-found-in-septic-tank-at-former-irish-home-for-unwed-mothers/

Good god...

Pity the youth ministry. It's a real struggle recruiting kids to your cause. You know who else struggled to recruit the young people? Life Savers Ministries of Opelika, Alabama, sure does.

Via the Columbus, Ga., Ledger-Enquirer:

A billboard at the Village Mall in Auburn, Ala., features five smiling kids beneath a quote from Adolf Hitler: "He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future."

According to Lamar Advertising's Montgomery office, the billboard was rented out by Life Savers Ministries, based in Opelika, Ala.
Worse still, the quote—with an attribution, in red, to der führer—sits just above the well-known Bible verse from Proverbs: "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it."

To be fair, Life Savers Ministries—which boasts a KidzBoost leadership academy and cool buses instead of school buses—is not a neo-Nazi group. Just well-intentioned youth pastors filled with spirit and a little naïveté:

The billboard went up Friday and will be taken down Tuesday, per LSM's request.

"We are pulling the billboard and certainly never intended to cause confusion. ... Herbert Hoover would have been a far better one to quote when he said, 'Children are our most valuable resource,'" founder James Anderegg told the Ledger-Enquirer.
Whitney Houston also would have worked, probably.

Anderegg added: "We are a children's organization and had honorable intentions and nothing less."

You know who else had honorable intentions?

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Mad Max wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Negligent homicide? Involuntary manslaughter?

How can someone carry out a dead baby twice a week and not become a whistle blower?

middle aged female wrote:

Mad Max wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Negligent homicide? Involuntary manslaughter?

How can someone carry out a dead baby twice a week and not become a whistle blower?

Because these people really believed that what they were doing was right; they were ONLY the bastard children of unwed mothers and the good sisters were being charitable by allowing the mothers to stay there and work their fingers to the bone for a bit of food and a roof and by keeping the children indoors and giving them some sort of education. If they died it was God's will or somebody else's fault; the Sisters had done all they could. The poor wee ones were probably better off dead that disgraced and their mothers could start life afresh. It wasn't like they were GOOD Catholics or anything.The sinning whores and their spawn.

One inconsistency is that according to an advert placed in a local paper, the Connacht Tribune in 1932, the Home was tendering for coffins. This would seem to be inconsistent with a policy that sought to expediently dispose of bodies in an undignified fashion.

Society and state wanted these women to disappear and colluded with the Church who were willing to provide institutions.

Amadeus wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

Mad Max wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Negligent homicide? Involuntary manslaughter?

How can someone carry out a dead baby twice a week and not become a whistle blower?

Because these people really believed that what they were doing was right; they were ONLY the bastard children of unwed mothers and the good sisters were being charitable by allowing the mothers to stay there and work their fingers to the bone for a bit of food and a roof and by keeping the children indoors and giving them some sort of education. If they died it was God's will or somebody else's fault; the Sisters had done all they could. The poor wee ones were probably better off dead that disgraced and their mothers could start life afresh. It wasn't like they were GOOD Catholics or anything.The sinning whores and their spawn.

Oops, turns out that maybe it wasn't a "septic tank" that held the bones, and maybe they weren't even the bones of the deceased children.

It's funny in a sad sort of way to watch and compare the reaction to these allegations and those about Kermit Gosnell's house of horrors from a few years ago and to the more recent silence about hospitals in the UK using the remains of aborted babies to heat their buildings.

The Catholic Church may have done something untoward? To the battlestations! Tear down their houses! Off with their metaphorical heads!

A licensed doctor nearly channeling the spirit of a Nazi doctor? Well, we'll just spin that and try to blame abortion opponents.

A hospital incinerating bodies to provide heat? Well, erm, um, let's just call that renewable energy!

http://carolinefarrow.com/2014/06/04/tu ... the-earth/

One inconsistency is that according to an advert placed in a local paper, the Connacht Tribune in 1932, the Home was tendering for coffins. This would seem to be inconsistent with a policy that sought to expediently dispose of bodies in an undignified fashion.

The column points out an important facet that we're quick to overlook, if we even perceive it long enough to register at all.

Society and state wanted these women to disappear and colluded with the Church who were willing to provide institutions.

What would have happened if the Church in Ireland had refused to open these homes? Are we to conclude that somehow society would have provided the help?

Who the fuck are we trying to kid? They would have lived outside, in the streets, dying in the open.

Instead of focusing on the failure of society and the state to provide any sort of help whatsoever, we instead rip into the group of people who were trying to help, in their flawed and in-over-their-heads way.

Labelled the "Maggies", the women and girls were stripped of their names and dumped in Irish Catholic church-run laundries where nuns treated them as slaves, simply because they were unmarried mothers, orphans or regarded as somehow morally wayward.

Over 74 years, 10,000 women were put to work in de facto detention, mostly in laundries run by nuns. At least 988 of the women who were buried in laundry grounds are thought to have spent most of their lives inside the institutions.

middle aged female wrote:

Amadeus wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

Mad Max wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Negligent homicide? Involuntary manslaughter?

How can someone carry out a dead baby twice a week and not become a whistle blower?

Because these people really believed that what they were doing was right; they were ONLY the bastard children of unwed mothers and the good sisters were being charitable by allowing the mothers to stay there and work their fingers to the bone for a bit of food and a roof and by keeping the children indoors and giving them some sort of education. If they died it was God's will or somebody else's fault; the Sisters had done all they could. The poor wee ones were probably better off dead that disgraced and their mothers could start life afresh. It wasn't like they were GOOD Catholics or anything.The sinning whores and their spawn.

Oops, turns out that maybe it wasn't a "septic tank" that held the bones, and maybe they weren't even the bones of the deceased children.

It's funny in a sad sort of way to watch and compare the reaction to these allegations and those about Kermit Gosnell's house of horrors from a few years ago and to the more recent silence about hospitals in the UK using the remains of aborted babies to heat their buildings.

The Catholic Church may have done something untoward? To the battlestations! Tear down their houses! Off with their metaphorical heads!

A licensed doctor nearly channeling the spirit of a Nazi doctor? Well, we'll just spin that and try to blame abortion opponents.

A hospital incinerating bodies to provide heat? Well, erm, um, let's just call that renewable energy!

http://carolinefarrow.com/2014/06/04/tu ... the-earth/

One inconsistency is that according to an advert placed in a local paper, the Connacht Tribune in 1932, the Home was tendering for coffins. This would seem to be inconsistent with a policy that sought to expediently dispose of bodies in an undignified fashion.

The column points out an important facet that we're quick to overlook, if we even perceive it long enough to register at all.

Society and state wanted these women to disappear and colluded with the Church who were willing to provide institutions.

What would have happened if the Church in Ireland had refused to open these homes? Are we to conclude that somehow society would have provided the help?

Who the fuck are we trying to kid? They would have lived outside, in the streets, dying in the open.

Instead of focusing on the failure of society and the state to provide any sort of help whatsoever, we instead rip into the group of people who were trying to help, in their flawed and in-over-their-heads way.

I spent 11 years in Catholic school with nuns every step of the way; I was so terrified of most of those old harridans that I still have nightmares about them. They were not all the kind and nurturing women people seem to want them to be. They could be cruel and many of them actively hated children. I can count on one hand the number of nuns who went out of their way to show affection or love for the kids in their care. They believed in the retribution of the Lord and told us that we would burn in hellfire forever for eating a piece of salami on a Friday or going to communion after eating. And this was when we were 7 yrs old. I had one lock me in a closet where I had to kneel in the dark holding a stack of Encyclopaedias in my out-stretched arms for 1/2 hour; I was 9 yrs. old. Later in the year, she taped my mouth shut and stood me in front of the class for an entire afternoon. But, I can still spell encyclopaedia correctly.
I have no difficulty in imagining the hell they put those poor teenage girls who made a mistake through. Many didn't even make a mistake; they were raped. And I'm fairly certain that there weren't milk and cookies and stories at bedtime for the kids; just prayers for forgiveness because they were bastard kids. Just being born a bastard was viewed as a sin.
Read about Magdalene Laundry system

Labelled the "Maggies", the women and girls were stripped of their names and dumped in Irish Catholic church-run laundries where nuns treated them as slaves, simply because they were unmarried mothers, orphans or regarded as somehow morally wayward.

Over 74 years, 10,000 women were put to work in de facto detention, mostly in laundries run by nuns. At least 988 of the women who were buried in laundry grounds are thought to have spent most of their lives inside the institutions.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/05/ireland-magdalene-laundry-system-apology

Amadeus wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

Amadeus wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

Mad Max wrote:

middle aged female wrote:

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:An ossiary of baby bones is terrible to contemplate, but is the article alleging that the home/nuns killed the children? Call me naieve, but I cannot believe that outside of genocide any one or organization would line up to slaughter children. The sad fate of unwanted children did not begin with Christianity or even humanity, which is not an excuse for anyone's misdeeds but it should provide some context.

Back to ossiaries: they're real and once were common, if the interwebs is to be believed.

I don't think the contention is that they killed them; it's more neglect and abuse that caused the deaths and then the little bodies were just tossed on the pile to rot.
But they didn't outright MURDER them.

Negligent homicide? Involuntary manslaughter?

How can someone carry out a dead baby twice a week and not become a whistle blower?

Because these people really believed that what they were doing was right; they were ONLY the bastard children of unwed mothers and the good sisters were being charitable by allowing the mothers to stay there and work their fingers to the bone for a bit of food and a roof and by keeping the children indoors and giving them some sort of education. If they died it was God's will or somebody else's fault; the Sisters had done all they could. The poor wee ones were probably better off dead that disgraced and their mothers could start life afresh. It wasn't like they were GOOD Catholics or anything.The sinning whores and their spawn.

Oops, turns out that maybe it wasn't a "septic tank" that held the bones, and maybe they weren't even the bones of the deceased children.

It's funny in a sad sort of way to watch and compare the reaction to these allegations and those about Kermit Gosnell's house of horrors from a few years ago and to the more recent silence about hospitals in the UK using the remains of aborted babies to heat their buildings.

The Catholic Church may have done something untoward? To the battlestations! Tear down their houses! Off with their metaphorical heads!

A licensed doctor nearly channeling the spirit of a Nazi doctor? Well, we'll just spin that and try to blame abortion opponents.

A hospital incinerating bodies to provide heat? Well, erm, um, let's just call that renewable energy!

http://carolinefarrow.com/2014/06/04/tu ... the-earth/

One inconsistency is that according to an advert placed in a local paper, the Connacht Tribune in 1932, the Home was tendering for coffins. This would seem to be inconsistent with a policy that sought to expediently dispose of bodies in an undignified fashion.

The column points out an important facet that we're quick to overlook, if we even perceive it long enough to register at all.

Society and state wanted these women to disappear and colluded with the Church who were willing to provide institutions.

What would have happened if the Church in Ireland had refused to open these homes? Are we to conclude that somehow society would have provided the help?

Who the fuck are we trying to kid? They would have lived outside, in the streets, dying in the open.

Instead of focusing on the failure of society and the state to provide any sort of help whatsoever, we instead rip into the group of people who were trying to help, in their flawed and in-over-their-heads way.

I spent 11 years in Catholic school with nuns every step of the way; I was so terrified of most of those old harridans that I still have nightmares about them. They were not all the kind and nurturing women people seem to want them to be. They could be cruel and many of them actively hated children. I can count on one hand the number of nuns who went out of their way to show affection or love for the kids in their care. They believed in the retribution of the Lord and told us that we would burn in hellfire forever for eating a piece of salami on a Friday or going to communion after eating. And this was when we were 7 yrs old. I had one lock me in a closet where I had to kneel in the dark holding a stack of Encyclopaedias in my out-stretched arms for 1/2 hour; I was 9 yrs. old. Later in the year, she taped my mouth shut and stood me in front of the class for an entire afternoon. But, I can still spell encyclopaedia correctly.
I have no difficulty in imagining the hell they put those poor teenage girls who made a mistake through. Many didn't even make a mistake; they were raped. And I'm fairly certain that there weren't milk and cookies and stories at bedtime for the kids; just prayers for forgiveness because they were bastard kids. Just being born a bastard was viewed as a sin.
Read about Magdalene Laundry system

Labelled the "Maggies", the women and girls were stripped of their names and dumped in Irish Catholic church-run laundries where nuns treated them as slaves, simply because they were unmarried mothers, orphans or regarded as somehow morally wayward.

Over 74 years, 10,000 women were put to work in de facto detention, mostly in laundries run by nuns. At least 988 of the women who were buried in laundry grounds are thought to have spent most of their lives inside the institutions.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/05/ireland-magdalene-laundry-system-apology

None of that changes the simple fact that we do not know the facts behind the bones. We could trade anecdotal personal experiences for a long time, since I spent 12 years in Catholic schools and experienced none of what you did, and neither did my parents before me. Neither of my sons have, either. But that has zero to do with something that may have happened thousands of miles away and decades ago.

They were discovered in the 1970s by two kids who busted through the concrete walls. The recent outrage would have us believe that just last week some upstanding citizen stumbled upon them. For all we know about them, they could be the remains of famine victims from the 1840s, since the building was in use even then.

doesn't change the facts about what the unwed mothers, their children and other orphans went through in the Irish Magdelane system and other church run orphanages and homes.

frank - up in grand blanc wrote:

doesn't change the facts about what the unwed mothers, their children and other orphans went through in the Irish Magdelane system and other church run orphanages and homes.

Yeah, but living beings have a history of being very tough on children of questionable paternity. Creating a bogeyman of a bad old partriarchial church to explain what is clearly an evil is not necessary because we, people, are inclined to flush away children who are not our own. Richard Dawkins lays out the argument for a biological precedent for slaughtering some among the "innocent." The upshot of the hypothesis is that one should not squander resources in support of children who do not carry one's genes. Shit, even lions will kill the cubs of other males when then come upon a new family group. I won't even say that there's a tyranny of patriarchy here because womenkind buy into regimine.

I expect better of my co-religionists as illustrated in the original story, but in light of the willingness of greater society to figuratively shit on these women and children I will ask: DID the order of nuns do worse by these young women and children?

Max's question about the contemporaries failing to shout to the rafters that an abomination was afoot strikes a chord: what about the present era's legal protection of abortion? How will the future regard the today's protection of the practice as well as the prioritization of privacy over incubating life? Myself, I understand and can argue both sides of the abortion issue, but as society changes (as it does; change is constant) will future generations judge us as being enlightened or as inheritors of the Bon Secor order's mantle of evil? "We do the best that we can," is the answer for today, and my read of western society is that as a general rule this is and has been true from at least the time of high Greek civilization. Periodic but temporary regressions aside, western society has liberalized in thought and in practice, and as such I read the past as being darker than the present and at the same time better than what it followed. Guess that I'm saying that I expect that our grandchildren will one day be talking shit about us and 2014 because of any number of sins omission.