I wonder, though, about the passion and vehemence of the response to these stories of what happened fifty years ago. Do these same people expend as much passion and energy on current injustices?

In most cases those dead children will have close relatives still alive and in some way suffering consequences from what the nuns did. Killing a child 50 years ago usually does mean a current injustice.

If you'd had a brother taken away in infancy and dropped down an anonymous hole somewhere after being refused baptism, wouldn't you want some sort of individual response that gave him a name and a story?