John McGuirk’s powerful recent article on the lies about the Tuam Mother-and-Baby home and the nuns who operated it comes at the beginning of an exhumation and identification process which will drag on for years.
The international media attention on Tuam and Catholic Ireland’s supposedly monstrous past will continue regardless of what is or is not found there.
The key facts are of course already available in the 2,865-page ‘Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes’ which was published in 2021, and then swiftly disavowed by Official Ireland on the grounds that it undermined their dogmatically anti-Catholic narrative.
As per the Gript editor’s piece, the report shows that the care provided by the Bon Secours Sisters contrasted sharply with the indifference shown by local and national politicians.
What the document says about the Mother Superior Sister Hortense (her constant struggle to improve conditions, how she worked to provide the penniless Tuam children with toys each Christmas, and how a former resident said she had “a heart of gold”) could be mentioned also.
Regardless of what is found in this exhumation, Sr. Hortense and the other Tuam nuns will not be forgiven.
Instead, digging up the past – and falsifying it if necessary – has become a trend. Campaigners are calling for another exhumation at the Roscrea Mother-and-Baby home.
Thus far, the total lack of evidence of inappropriate burials there means that the government is unwilling to take such a step, but should Roscrea become a cause célèbre, another excavation is likely.
Over many decades, an extraordinarily vicious caricature of Ireland’s religious sisters has been created, which is now fueling this mad frenzy.
Generations of women who lived lives of prayer and service have been maliciously slandered.
In 2002, ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ film was released.
Considering that Ireland was still moderately religious in 2002, with many religious sisters still working in schools or elsewhere in public life, it is striking just how vicious the portrayal of nuns was. Not only were they greedy, they were also unspeakably brutal.
At one point, two of the nuns humiliate the women by examining them as they stand outside the showers naked. As Wikipedia puts it, the “nuns then hold a “contest” on who has the most pubic hair, biggest bottom, biggest breasts and smallest breasts.”
Last year’s nun-as-villain blockbuster ‘Small Things Like These’ was tame by comparison.
Here too, the nuns were vicious and avaricious in equal measure. In Cillian Murphy’s imaginary retelling of when Ireland was “like the f_____g Dark Ages,” a resident of the laundry is dragged inside by a nun. Another pregnant inmate is repeatedly locked in a coal shed for some unknown offence.
The residents are depicted as living in constant terror of their virginal guards, not one of whom is shown to possess any compassion or kindness.
After witnessing the mistreatment of a resident, Cillian Murphy’s character meets the Mother Superior and is promptly bribed to stay quiet.
The entire conversation between them takes place in a room barely illuminated by an open fire – a setting which consciously or unconsciously reflects the atmosphere in every Dracula installment when the protagonist first enters the Count’s Transylvanian castle.
In ‘Small Things Like These,’ Murphy’s character must face the brutal economic power of the convent, with another character warning him that “those nuns have a finger in every pie.”
Of course, none of this is true. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes did us all another service in compressing their key findings into a 76-page Executive Summary, which anti-Catholic politicians and journalists are just as keen to forget.
This states that the “Commission has not seen any evidence that the religious orders who ran the mother and baby homes made a profit,” but that they instead “struggled to make ends meet and their members were not always paid for their work.”
Despite the torment meted out in ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ film, the report also showed that “there is no evidence of the sort of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools.”
As the authors summed things up, the Mother-and-Baby Homes were “provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all.”
‘Small Things Like These’ was ahistorical propaganda, and so was ‘The Magdalene Sisters.’ Still it goes on, and Ireland’s remaining nuns – whose average age is above 80 – are destined to spend their last years as the targets of ever more intense hatred.
Where will this process of distorting the past lead?
Spain offers a frightening possibility. As in Ireland, Spanish nationhood is interwoven with Catholicism, and just as with Ireland, a large segment of the population has grown to hate the Church with a virulent passion.
Anti-clericalism developed much earlier in Spain though. In 1834, a rumour that Jesuits and friars had poisoned Madrid’s water supply led to attacks on convents, monasteries and other Catholic institutions which claimed dozens of lives.
The ill-feeling of leftist Spaniards towards priests and nuns only intensified over the next century, and debates over Catholic education and the role of Catholicism in public life were at the heart of a social divide which slowly became a chasm.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, it was to be a religious war as much as a political one. In the areas which they controlled, the Spanish Republicans outlawed all religious practice, and launched a murderous onslaught against the most visible representation of the Church – its priests, monks and nuns. The final death toll for the religious was around 6,800, including almost 300 nuns.
Even the supporters of the Republic conceded that its footsoldiers were motivated by a violent atheism. Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ includes a description of a massacre of defenceless conservatives after the Communist takeover of a town, culminating in the murder of the priest.
“All day I had waited for the death of the priest…I had never seen a priest die,” the Republican guerrilla leader reflects.
George Orwell was not a reporter on the Republican side, but a soldier, and in ‘Homage to Catalonia,’ he describes how his comrades destroyed churches systematically, while noting that crosses on tombstones were removed with chisels in Republican Spain.
The dead could not, and were not, left in peace. Their beliefs were evil and had to be challenged, and so they had to be challenged in public.
Of all the horrifying violence perpetrated by the Spanish Republicans, the most visually disgusting aspect was surely the digging up of some dead nuns, and the display of their skeletal remains.
For Spanish Republican revolutionaries, raised on bloodcurdling stories of monstrous nuns and priests, literally digging up the past as a means of improving the present and securing a socialist future was an obvious if morbid step.
A hatred that visceral cannot develop without an intergenerational campaign of calumny, and while we have not nearly reached the same point as Spain in 1936, this is certainly what has been underway here in Ireland.
John McGuirk’s observation that the twisting of morality in the past feels “exceedingly totalitarian” is an accurate one.
We are no longer at an early stage of this process – the fact that it is difficult to point out the facts about official government-sponsored reports in polite society shows how much damage has already been done.
Nuns remain problematic as a category in the secularist worldview. Their mere existence is a challenge to the feminist argument that the Church is a misogynistic organisation where women have no place. In a world where women and girls are told to embrace an ideology of sexual liberation and self-interest, the example of religious sisters points to an objectively better way of living.
Living or dead, they have to be destroyed reputationally, and perhaps physically as well.
If a collective effort is not made soon to challenge this campaign of hate, there will be no limit to the darkness which could ensue, because if the reputations of the honourable dead cannot be defended, then their remains will not be considered sacred either.
The ongoing assault on the dead may well be a prelude to an assault on the living as well.