Note to MG: When Italy became a nation in the 1870s, the whole central part of the "boot" was absorbed into that new nation. That part of Italy had been the Papal States. In the Lateran Concordat of 1929, Italy compensated the Vatican for the loss of the Papal States. That money became the endowment that has supported the Vatican to this day - and yes, there has been corruption in the management of that money at times, but the money is still there. So, the Vatican is in the enviable position of being healthily endowed and largely self-supporting.
The Vatican does have worldwide collections like the Peter's Pence collection (now used for philanthropy, but once used to support the Vatican), but most of those are for international relief.

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This mass grave in Ireland is a challenging situation to respond to. I don't imagine I'll prevail in this discussion, since I've lost out in so many others. And for that matter, I really don't know what is the appropriate response. All I seek to do is to examine the response to such atrocities and try to learn what is appropriate and effective.

It seems to me, that every nation has its "original sin," something that the nation as a whole must take responsibility for - for all time. America has two such "original sins" - racism, and the European conquest of Native American land. Everyone in America who is white, has reaped some sort of undeserved reward from these two sins, and all with black or Native American blood are still suffering the cost of these sins. Now, I suppose if my great grandfather hadn't left Germany in the 1870s to become a furrier in Detroit, the Offer branch of my family would have died in a concentration camp in Europe. And the McQuade branch of my family might have died of starvation in Ireland in the 1840s. Still the next generation prospered, as did those after that.

Now, despite the fact that my great-grandparents were immigrants and refugees themselves, my grandparents were horribly racist - as were all in their generation. I remember hearing them say things in the 1960s that were embarrassingly racist. Oh, and the things they said about homosexuals were even worse.

And now I live in a nice place in California, which once was part of Mexico - but Mexican people who come to work here are considered "illegal" and are deported by the hundreds of thousands. I suppose I should feel horrible that I live in this nice place - but instead of condemning myself, I save my condemnation for people who live in really opulent places.

I'm working on the issue of mass incarceration in the United States, and one of the first things I learned was the amazing percentage of nonwhites in U.S. prisons. Isn't that a direct effect of the racism of my grandparents?

I hear an outcry from many about the priest who said on RTE saying that times were different then. He didn't deny what happened, and he didn't try to downplay the significance of what happened (although we don't really know the details of what happened yet). All he said that that times were different then. And that's true. The times of our grandparents were cruel times, in many, many ways. In Ireland, the power of oppression was embodied in the Church. In England, it was the ruling classes. In Germany, it was the nobles and then the industrialists and then the Nazi Party. In the United States, it was the slave owners. But wherever the center of power was, the truth of the matter is that the times of our grandparents were very cruel times.

So, now we're half a century later, and we're still trying to assess the blame and exact a price from whomever we can blame. In Ireland and most of Europe, everybody's after the Church - but the Church is no longer what it was, and yet so many of you act like the Inquisition were still going on. The Church is a very good scapegoat, because it's still there despite the fact that so many people no longer belong to it. And so all those former members can feel righteous and clean, and can deny all responsibility to the misdeeds of their ancestors.

But you know, if you have any sort of comfortable lifestyle, you most probably have benefitted from the suffering of all those people who suffered during the times of your grandparents. You're eating food that should have been eaten by the children and grandchildren of those 796 babies that didn't live, and you're living in houses where they should have lived.

Somebody above said that this mass grave must be investigated so that such a thing will never happen again. That is absolutely true. However, whenever something like this happens, there is a natural human urge to find somebody to blame, somebody other than ourselves. If we don't learn in our investigations that we are all responsible for the sins of our ancestors, then we have not learned the lesson that we need to learn from all this. Yes, the times of our grandparents were cruel times - but there is infinite cruelty and injustice in our current society.

We can waste our energy trying to assess blame for the past cruelty of our society, or we can open our eyes and see the cruelty that exists in our current time and spend our lives working to fix it.

I prefer the latter approach.

-Joe-