Perverted Dirt Digging

“Thanks to a Twittermob constantly on the hunt for things it might feel ostentatiously outraged by,” the Irish nuns dump dead babies in septic tank story shot round the world and is still held as true by millions. Others have posted links to news articles giving the real story, but Spiked!‘s Brendan O’Neil offers a good summary in The Tuam tank: another myth about evil Ireland.

Clearly this isn’t about news anymore; it isn’t a desire for facts or truth that elevated the crazed claims about Tuam up the agenda; rather, a mishmash of anti-Catholic prejudice, Irish self-hatred and the modern thirst for horror stories involving children turned Tuam into one of the worst reported stories of 2014 so far. . . . [W]hat we have today in pretty much every discussion of Ireland’s history is nothing like analysis but rather a kind of perverted dirt-digging, a scrabbling about in the events of the past for evidence of Catholic depravity and human suffering that we can all now get off on denouncing and being showily shocked by.

I commend the article itself for O’Neil’s description of what actually seems to have happened. (O’Neil, who I think grew up Catholic, is as far as I can tell an agnostic.) But I would add that Catholics ought to get used to this kind of thing. There is a critical mass of people, in the major media and even more on the web, who will believe and communicate anything about that makes the Catholic Church look bad and do so loudly and hysterically and with complete disregard for the truth.