"Jim, the septic tank at my house looks almost exactly like the concrete vaults that I have seen coffins"
Joe,
Personally, I don't give a rat's arse what happens too my remains when I shuffle off this mortal coil - I once suggested to our publican/undertaker that I would be happy to be cremated and my ashes placed in one of his ashtrays and put on his windowsill to enable me to spend more time in a place that gave me a great deal of pleasure in life.
That apparently is not the case with you Catholics, who make far more of death and burial than I do.
P placing children, in death, in shit-holes (no matter how magnificent), after they have suffered extreme abuse and neglect throughout their short lives, seems to me the final indignity - the equivalent of spitting on their maltreated corpses for the "sinners" they were.
I do not not "call these vaults" anything; I took the trouble to point out the historical possibilities of what they might be.
One of the suggestions made regarding Tuam is that the some of the bodies may not have been inmates of the home, but Famine victims from earlier times.
Hopefully, this is the case, even thought the Famine carries with it examples of hatred and neglect to possible genocidal proportions - this also has been under examination as part of our history over the lat decade.
All of these examples of extreme cruelty and neglect: clerical child abuse and, the Magdalene Laundries, the brutality of the industrial schools and now emerging as an issue, the sale of illegitimate children to wealthy Americans following the Philomena Lee film; raise the one question - the suitability of the church as an influential body to be given access to and influence over children, and people's lives in general.
A new film, 'Jimmy's hall', raises the a question that interests me deeply; that of the influence of the church over the music I have been involved with for most of my life.
Don't you dare attribute a "project" to me - I am not a 'practicing' atheist any more than I am a practicing believer.
I will comment on these incidents as they come up as a 'practicing' humanitarian who finds the church very much wanting in this matter - that is the extent of my "project" - nothing more.
Would that your church had more humanitarians honest enough to examine their own sordid past, without feeling the need to make excuses and point the finger elsewhere.
Jim Carroll