A Truth revealed, is slowing coming to light, the story of the tens of thousands of babies stolen at birth and sold abroad by the Irish Catholic Church. This illegal sale through Irish Catholic Adoptive Agencies was and is a scandal. Mothers to this day continue to search for their disappeared children. In the depravity that marked the period, young unwed mothers were enslaved or killed after giving birth and their babies were stolen and handed over to Irish Catholic Church Adoptive Agencies to raise. In continued crimes committed by the powerful Irish Catholic Church, it's impossible to imagine something more evil than this. The Irish Catholic Church falsifying names and births on birth certificates, and openly helping American families to adopt babies, stolen from their doomed unwed mothers, back in Ireland. Nobody in the Irish Catholic Church has been charged with kidnapping and falsifying official documents. Many unwed mothers, to this day carry two weights, called “Shame” and “Guilt”, and blamed themselves for the loss of their babies. We here in Ireland need to deal and uncover the true crimes of the past, that more than 65,000 babies were stolen during the dictatorship of the Irish Catholic Church in Ireland alone, and to many experts that figure is much higher, the theft of babies was systematic in all Irish Mother and Baby Homes.
We need the Irish Government to immediately thrown their support behind the effort to uncover the crimes of the past, the theft and illegal sale of Irish babies from over 200 Mother and Baby Homes and religious Orphanages in Ireland. "We do not have time to keep waiting, for promises of Irish Government help, many mothers are getting older by the day, and dying off, emotionally mutilated by the lies of the Irish Catholic Church and never knowing what became of their stolen babies, sold to who and where”. Some babies, as many as 650, were murdered or died in transit, an unwed mother who had her baby stolen or murdered cannot ever live as before, her life is truly over. Ireland must not forget their past, some of the unwed mothers died in suspicious circumstances giving birth in the Irish Mother and Baby Homes. Their family were never informed, but the baby was removed immediately and sold on. Many more unwed mothers were told by the Nuns, that ran the Mother and Baby Homes that their babies died at birth, but in reality the baby was simply stolen. A few mothers many years later or even decades later, learnt, that the baby they had been told by the cruel Nuns, had died at birth, was a lie and in fact her baby did not died at birth, but was sold by the Nuns into America. Many Irish babies that were adopted in America, learnt years later or realise that the family who raised them was a participant in the sale of illegal babies, and that their adoptive parents bought them, like slabs of beef from Irish Catholic Agencies, operating in both Ireland and the United States of America. Their true mothers are still alive somewhere in Ireland, to this day, the adoptees feel pain, anger, great sadness, and rage at the lies, the loss, and the church. Many adoptees on learning the truth of their background, take a DNA test, with many legally change their name, once their mother’s are found. Many want their passports and ID Cards with their true family name. The waiting stolen babies were placed in a temporary Mother and Baby Home, or housed with a family who worked for the Irish Catholic Church, or Irish Catholic Agencies. Once in the temporary Mother and Baby Home, all the stolen babies went through special "quality selection" for a detailed examination, combined with psychological tests and medical examinations made by doctors friendly to the Irish Catholic Church, or the Irish Catholic Agencies. The doctors would note the child's "racial value" and would determine the baby’s body proportions, eye colour, hair colour, and any heath problems, such as tuberculosis or traveller characteristics of the Irish Travelling community, other characteristics to include identified birthmarks, many stolen babies were also rejected if the birthmark was too big. These medical exams carried out by Irish Doctors determined the fate of the baby, whether the baby would be sent to back or to another Mother and Baby Home or experience other consequences. For example, after forcibly taking a child away from their unwed mothers, all “medical exams" were performed in secret. The Irish Catholic Church knew that the eye colour and the hair colour of the stolen baby was important and some stolen babies commanded more money, if say they had an accommodation of blond hair, blue eyes, or red hair and green eyes. Baby boys also commanded more premium than girls. Once the baby was selected, the baby was sent to special homes to await the sale and transfer of monies into the Irish Catholic Church coffers. In the meantime, the stolen baby’s name and birth was altered to new names and birthday, normally to the new adoptive parents name, and sometimes at the request of the new parents, the birthday would be altered too.The new parents who were adopting a Irish stolen baby would be informed that the mother had died at birth even if they were not. In some cases, the efforts were so successful that the children lived and died believing themselves to be the children of their new parents. Some very young children, aged between two and eight, were sent to special Irish homes, and fattened up so to speak, these illegitimate children were deemed more valuable, there, they would be observed for a period of time before finally been sold for higher sums of money. The Irish Catholic Church were masters in devising and forging new Irish names and new birth certificates to hide the stolen baby’s pasts. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs were willing enablers of the Irish Catholic Church, and were used to issue new passports for the stolen babies, on the instructions of the Irish Catholic Church. Some new parents were informed that the baby’'s new birth certificates had been falsified, but were reassured by the Irish Catholic Church that there would never be a problem, as any and all documents had ben destroyed. The thousands of stolen Irish babies sold into America were robbed of their Irish heritage, many were maltreated by their adoptive parents. Some adoptive parents demanded adoption certificates, such records were forged for them by the Irish Catholic Church. Adopting stolen Irish Babies was a huge business, involving hundreds of millions of Irish pounds that flowed freely into Irish Catholic Church coffers, on a daily basis. Infants and Children were often heard every night crying, a sad lament throughout the entire nights. Babies from several months old, to the older children normally 5 or 6 years old who would cry out for their mothers, inconsolably pain, calling for their mothers. These older children’s job was to feed and keep quiet the infants, screaming away for their mothers. Always through tears, many of the older children could be heard begging with the dispassionate Nuns with a passionate expression of grief and sorrow, asking the passionless Nuns for food, for water, for a toilet, for a simple act of humility, Please Sister help me, I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, I’m tired, only to fall on deaf ears. Their simple pleas for mercy and help always fell on deaf ears. I could never as a seven year old child, ever describe the joy of the child when they saw their mothers, coming for a few minutes visit, normally the mother would sneak into the dormitory, it was heart wrenching, she would be seen picking up the child and breastfeeding the baby, by the cot with whatever nourishment she could offer, and the screaming of deranged Nuns with sticks beating them away and back to their end of the Convent. Also the new mother knew instinctively where her child was in the dormitory of a hundred baby cots, and without conscious thought picked her child up to hold to her breast, shower with kisses and hug. Watching the new Mother with her child was love in motion, the baby would cry softly at the touch of its Mother caressing hands, an intimacy of pure joy and love.The child’s little hands embraced its Mother’s neck, gently pulling at her hair, the silent kisses of both of them, floats and echoes throughout their shared pain and sadness. From the child’s over excited heart, a murmur, a whisper, a deep sigh, flows out. The hungry child’s starving mouth, grasps the mother’s bare breast with both hands, the child’s bare head is wet from the flood of tears, falling like raindrops, each teardrop, a love shared, each tear a painful reminder of a Mother’s loss, each moment a memory, etched in a ripple of future memories, as the Mother is violently ripped away from her child, her world, her baby. The Child soon, exhausted by Mother’s great sadness and tears, falls fitfully asleep, Mother disappears into howling pain, as she is dragged screaming from her baby’s cot. At each cot, each Mother cries as she is pulled and beaten away by the cruel and despicable Nuns. A chorus of distressful pleads heard nightly from grieving mothers “Please Sister”, “Please Sister,” a few moments!, a few minutes!, just a moment in God’s name!, my baby!, my child!. “Please Sister,” look at its bare heart? its suffering eyes!!, its tears!!, “Please Sister”, grieving Mothers wail, convulsive gasps of sobs, pleading, “let me take care of my baby, Sister please?, my child!, my love!, other babies immediately begin to wail. But the harden hearts of the unscrupulous Nuns hardens, a knowing smile, lights their darkened faces, by morning many of the babies would be missing, stolen by the child snatchers, reprehensible Nuns, who would relish in telling grieving mothers that their baby died during the night, and is now in hell for eternity for the sins committed by you, you unwed whores!, your not mothers!, a spiteful Nun would spit out with venom. There would be no mystery of the babies disappearance, but instead kidnapped by the ruthless Irish Catholic Church and a collaborating Irish Government, handed over to wealthy families in America for illegal adoptions, domestic chores and a life of horrendous abuse. Another lifetime of searching as future adults, lost, as they try to piece together their stolen pasts. The reprehensible Nuns would then erased the very existence of the stolen babies from their records once the baby was sold. The unwed mothers, physically exhausted and malnourished were devoured within the harsh Magdalene Laundry Gulags as life slaves to their new slave masters, the insufferable Nuns. Magdalene Laundry Gulags run by the Irish Catholic Church were an integral part of Catholic Ireland between the years 1926 to 1996. Magdalene Laundries were a "camp" where unwed women and their children were imprisoned for being born out of Catholic Church wedlock, such as been unmarried. The conditions in these Magdalene Laundries were very harsh, much rougher then any Irish Prison at the time. Women imprisoned in the Magdalene Laundry Gulags were often forced to work 14 to 18 hours a day, for no pay, and very little food, as well as been neglected and abused daily. The horrendous true stories of the notorious Magdalene Laundry Gulags are extremely disturbing and often heartbreaking. The stories of life in these Irish Magdalene Laundry Gulags and all the brutality within is unbelievable. It will never be understood how such atrocious acts could be acted upon other human beings, particularly by the Irish Catholic Church. The idea that these acts of cruelty were organised makes it that much more unbelievable. How could so many Religious People gather together, justify and make decisions on the mistreatment, rape, beatings, torture, the selling of stolen babies and even murder itself, of tens of thousands of vulnerable women and their children. How could a Nun, a Priest, a Religious Brother go home to their Convents, their Monasteries, their Religious Houses, and pray in their Churches, after a day at work at a Magdalene Laundry? an Industrial School, or an Orphanage. How could they not see that what they were doing was wrong, beyond wrong, simply evil. ! "The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.”;- The tragedy of "Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare Owen Felix O’Neill
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The opposite of good is not evil - it is indifference. And we here in Ireland must never be indifferent when it comes to the banality of evil. The root of all evil is the love of money, and the Roman Catholic Church truly loves power and wealth. But, as Lord Acton wrote in 1897 opposing the doctrine of the Pope’s infallibility:
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” I don't believe, however, that there can be a 'radical evil' a phrase used by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in “Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone” (1793). He wrote: “The depravity of human nature, then, is not so much to be called badness, if this word is taken in its strict sense, namely, as a disposition (subjective principle of maxims) to adopt the bad, as bad, into one’s maxims as a spring (for that is devilish); but rather perversity of heart, which, on account of the result, is also called a bad heart. This may co-exist with a Will [“Wille”] good in general, and arises from the frailty of human nature, which is not strong enough to follow its adopted principles, combined with its impurity in not distinguishing the springs (even of well-intentioned actions) from one another by moral rule. So that ultimately it looks at best only to the conformity of its actions with the law, not to their derivation from it, that is, to the law itself as the only spring. Now although this does not always give rise to wrong actions and a propensity thereto, that is, to vice, yet the habit of regarding the absence of vice as a conformity of the mind to the law of duty (as virtue) must itself be designated a radical perversity of the human heart (since in this case the spring in the maxims is not regarded at all, but only the obedience to the letter of the law).” I suspect that even the most rabid Christian Brother, well-intentioned Nun or, for that matter, a Roman Catholic Priest, probably did not consider themselves as 'evil' or guilty of committing an evil act, but rather as a well-meaning Christian Person, protecting the integrity and purity of their Church. The problem with the Roman Catholic hierarchies is that those at the top are distanced by design and dynamics from those at the bottom. The whole Christian Clerical education system is fine- tuned towards producing brainwashed, useful idiots, to serve the dysfunction of an over-centralised Vatican. Trainee priests were needed to fill those necessary lower niches, but were required to be useful idiots so as to not even think beyond the specialisation. Christian Seminary Colleges never have been, and probably never will be, a magnet for education in the liberal arts tradition of being politically subversive enough to actually question authority, much less challenge it. After all, the Pope’s rule is absolute as are his religious decrees with papal infallibility being dogma in the Catholic Church. The conceit of the Roman Catholic Church is that it is a hierarchy based on the relentless advance of the best and brightest - a meritocracy. It is hard to identify radical evil in the system itself but relatively easy to see the banality of indifference and wilful ignorance regarding the suffering of others. After all, suffering runs through the Christian creed. Let’s also not conceal the fact that suffering is something complex, enigmatic and intangible that must be treated with full respect and compassion and even with awe. The Catholic Church teaching is that “Through suffering, human beings are incorporated into the pain of Christ. Suffering gives rise to love for those who suffer, a disinterested love to help them by relieving it”. The real banality of evil is personified in the defenders of the Catholic Church regime which has many such defenders but no defence. One such defender is Bill Donohue who, since 1993, has been President of the The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, (often shortened to the Catholic League) in the United States. The Catholic League considers itself to be an American Catholic anti-defamation and civil rights organisation. Recently, Bill Donohue has been trying ever so hard to discredit the newly released Pennsylvania grand jury’s report, (which can be found here https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/report/) documenting thousands of examples of American Catholic Church Priests sexually abusing and raping thousands of children. The indifferent Catholic League under Bill Donohue's leadership is often criticised for its ultra conservatism and for its combative responses to high-profile media stories. Besides education campaigns, the group issues condemnations, defends all Catholic Priests against accusations of child sexual rape, fights proposed legislation to prevent it and threatens legal action against what it sees as bigotry against Catholics, irreverence against religious figures, and attacks on Catholic Church dogma. Mr. Donohue argues that a lot of the reported abuse shouldn’t even count since not all victims were penetrated and some weren’t even pre-pubescent. He’s also said that rape also occurs elsewhere, so the Catholic Church’s scandals aren’t really that big a deal and, as most of the rapes didn’t occur in the past few years, everyone needs to lay off the clerics. Mr. Donohue continues, when we read that a Cardinal asked young seminarians to sleep with him, thus corrupting them before they became ordained, and when we read that a few Pennsylvania Priests used sacred objects like the crucifix to molest (rape) their victims, we cannot plausibly say that this is simply the work of men gone bad. No, it is the work of the Devil/ Satan. What other source would provoke such monstrosities? It’s the No True Scotsman fallacy all the time, Mr. Donohue says -the moment a Catholic priest crosses the line, he must not have been truly Catholic. So the “No true Scotsman” or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalisation from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample. Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric. For example “no true Scotsman would do such a thing”- Person A: "No Scotsman puts raisins on his porridge.” Person B: "But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts raisins on his porridge. "Person A: "But no true Scotsman puts raisins on his porridge.” i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group. Indeed, Mr. Donohue goes on to say that the Roman Catholic Church was the saviour of the orphan children, and, in fact, of all children, whether in care of the Church or at home with their families. Mr. Donohue has also said that the raped children were ‘spiritually uplifted’ after their encounters with the pedophile priests. He argues that everyone is in what he calls a “Moral Panic” over the Roman Catholic Church: “The Catholic Church has never had a monopoly on the mistreatment of some young people, yet that is what is being promoted today. Why? To feed an anti-Catholic moral panic. He continues to say that the media, both domestically and internationally are focusing exclusively on abuse of minors in Catholic institutions and stubbornly refusing to credit the Catholic Church for reforms that have made today’s Catholic settings among the safest places for children in order to perpetuate an irrational fear that the Catholic Church poses a unique threat to the safety of children. Donohue asks the question, “How come the media and international media are not reporting on that?” In October 2009, Bill Donohue said that the Roman Catholic Church has a "homosexual", not a "pedophilia", problem. The Catholic League defended its attacking of Church critics on the grounds that they were "a menace” to the Roman Catholic Church. On May 20, 2009, Reuters reported the results of a nine-year investigation by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which looked into decades of the endemic sexual abuse and rape of children in Catholic-run reform schools in Ireland. In reaction to this report, popularly known as the Ryan Report, Bill Donohue issued a statement downplaying the seriousness of the cases, questioning the inclusion of “voyeurism” and "inappropriate sexual talk" as instances of sexual abuse along with the more serious charge of rape. Bill Donohue pointed out that rape constituted only 12% of the listed sexual abuse cases in the Ryan report and that priests committed only 12% of the listed rapes—the other 88% were committed by lay persons and Religious Brothers. Since the Ryan Report was released, Bill Donohue has been defending the Irish Catholic Church and claiming that much of the outrage is 'moral hysteria'. While stating that he agrees that rape and physical abuse are wrong and that he would not defend those actions, he says the report has conflated those abuses with 'lesser' forms of punishment and is therefore not as serious. He also says many of the purported forms of abuse found by the commission were present and acceptable in the time period. Bill Donohue has also claimed that the mass disposal site of babies’ corpses found in Tuam, Ireland, was ‘a myth’ and ‘a hoax’, and that the Tuam Mother and Baby Home atrocity is 'fake news.’ I wonder what he will say when the bodies of over 1,800 babies are recovered from the septic tank soon, and to their still living brothers and sisters and even mothers. Which was the most disturbing passage in the whole thing, the denial of the babies flushed into a septic tank or Tuam Mother and Baby Home didn’t exist. Let’s not pause before our answer is given, and in that pause you are afraid that someone is going to try to cover for what happened. Mr. Bill Donohue is surely trying to avoid reality and judgment. All he really does is to cause more pain and suffering on those like myself and thousands of others that lost family members in such places and survived. This truly is The Banality of Evil, as espoused by the likes of Bill Donohue, and by both his insufferable Catholic League and the wider unendurable Roman Catholic Church. Apart from what Bill Donohue says or thinks, we only have to look at the main point of the debates about the Catholic Religious Institutions in Ireland whose history is one of relentless cruelty and pitiless pain inflicted on the inmates at the hands of the Irish Religious Orders : brutal rapes, murderousness beatings, callous torture and even merciless death. It is very clear that violence, torture, and murder were part of the system from the very beginning. One only has to read The full Ryan Report to understand this - every Religious Run Institution in Ireland had a problem. Now, sadly, we know that probably every Catholic-run Religious Institution throughout the world had the same problems. The Roman Catholic Church may feel comfortable in their power, but they are always apprehensive, and the more international stories that come out about their malfeasances, the more they live in fear. I try never to write a word or a line without some doubt and hesitation, but write I will, just to make sense of it all. Here in Ireland (in the very recent past) Irish Clerics swarmed the streets of every city, town, village and hamlet of Ireland. Many of the Clerics were irresponsible and drunk on priestly power and the People lived in fear of them. Even the Irish Police could exercise little, if any, control of them as the institutional and individual Irish Police also lived in fear of them. But while blowhard plutocrat like Mr. Donohue demands equal rights for the American Catholic Priests and the Roman Catholic Church’s governing body, I also demand equal rights for the living and the dead Survivors of Clerical Rapes and Murder. Owen Felix O’Neill |
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