Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How The Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue to discuss one the darkest chapters in all of Irish history. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. That was my very racist Irish accent. Wow, it looks like the unsubscribed numbers for Ireland are huge for this episode. All seven people in Ireland have stopped listening to our podcast. Okay, and now those seven people have told another seven people and they have told another seven people.

And now all 21 people in Ireland hate it. But our listenership in the UK has tripled. We do love the Irish, don't we? You know, it's funny because when we took the break, I went outside and I had to water my plants because it's 90 in Portland today. And we needed to water them a second time. And most of what I'm growing is potatoes. Because I love growing the potatoes. I'm working on, I don't have enough land right now.

You got any sweet potatoes in that ass? No, I don't trust sweet potatoes. I love normal potatoes, though. I don't trust them. What do you think they're hiding? They're openly sweet. I know, and that's what I don't trust about them. Okay, well, you are a dumb bitch.

It's like the people in my life who are sweet and I don't trust them. Are you growing? Are you going Yukon Gold potatoes? Yes, that's one of the potatoes I had. I just threw the gifts I got you in the trash because you didn't trust me. Because I don't trust people who are nice to me. It's true. He doesn't. That's why I'm so mean. Robert, you love me. Come on.

Yeah, but I don't like being loved in return. Am I the one who's responsible for your nickname podcast daddy? Yes, I am. You are. Can you trust someone who has nicknamed you such? You can. Would I ever steal a knife from you? No, I would not.

Well, I have enough that you could get away with it. I would solicit your listeners to send me my own knives. Yeah, send Sophia knives. Just don't send Sophia knives and unlabeled packages. No, and also remember our rule. If you send Sophia knives, you absolutely put a happy face on the knife. Yeah, that's how we know it's a friendly knife. Or this is not a death threat letter.

That's always a nice thing to send. Love. Love this is not a death threat letter. A sticker, you know. A hatch anything. This is not a death threat patch to put on your battle jacket. Yes, I would fucking love that. That would actually be rad.

People think I'm disarming and then I stabbed them in the heart. It's perfect. It's great. At the end of this episode, I will give you my KO box number so you can send me your happy face knives. Send Sophia some knives, some friendly knives. You deserve them. So, Sophia, last episode, we talked a lot about a lot of horrible shit. And we talked about the Magdalene Laundries and how the Catholic Church was, you know, part of how this was justified.

It was like the Irish government can't afford a lot of social services. The Catholic Church will provide them because it's just such a G-shox, good thing, the Catholic Church. And it turns out it's somehow cheaper to murder people than it is to provide them with social services. And rape them. And rape them. I'm sorry. And rape your babies and force them to labor for you in a laundry room for profit and also sewing for profit. But that's not all they forced incarcerated women to do for profit, Sophia.

And that brings me to a real fun story. We're going to have a good time with this one. We're going to get it. I went before I get into the story. I just want you to think about all, everyone here, everyone who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, all the good time, good times you had, you know, playing board games. I thought you were going to be like, playing on Uncle Bill Clinton's lap while he plays the saxophone. Remember the good days? Just remember the good days of playing, playing mousetrap, you know, a little bit of monopoly, right?

Playing all those classics, those classic board games from your favorite board game maker. Remember the game of life where you could afford a house in it? Like an actual life? I just want you to think of all those positive board game memories you have. As I read this story, I found on the website Little Adams as part of a series called The Penance Industry by J.P. O. Malley, or an article called The Penance Industry by J.P. O. Malley. Now, the author's great aunt was a woman named Elsie, who spent basically her entire life in service to the church. The initial crime for which she was incarcerated was having a child out of wedlock. Now, Elsie was still basically a child herself when her own family sent her to a Magdalene laundry operated by the good shepherd sisters in Waterford.

This is how it often worked in Ireland, a profoundly Catholic population who were only too happy to report their daughters, nieces, and cousins for getting pregnant out of wedlock. Elsie wound up spending the rest of her life in the custody of the church. She lived with them until her late 80s. J.P. O. Malley writes, quote, As far back as I can remember, Elsie would talk openly to us kids about the work she did at the convent. She and the other women she told us were made to assemble in package popular Hasbro board games. That's right. Oh, my God. Hasbro, baby.

Yeah. I knew I could smell the Hasson Field Brothers. Coming off the monopoly. Yeah, the motherfuckers who made your G.I. Joe's and made your, I don't think those were made in these places, but their board games were. Yes, the Hasbro corporation profited off of the indentured labor of women who imprisoned for the crime of having a child. Or, as we noted last episode, of stealing an apple. Now, we're talking about. Hasbro, more like house slave. Am I right?

Okay. Yeah. I'll never come back to this show. This sounds like some fucking fifties and sixties shit, maybe, but this program with Hasbro started in the 1980s. There is a very good chance that some, if not most of the people listening to this podcast, played with board games assembled by women who were basically slaves of the Catholic Church. According to Elsie, Mousetrap was apparently the worst board game to us. I think this is probably more for our listeners who played board games that were, you know, they bought in Ireland or the UK or in Europe. I don't know how, like Hasbro sold a lot of board games.

No, a lot of them had other labor rights issues. But yeah, a lot of them were made by women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries. And again, Mousetrap was the worst of them. JP O'Malley continues, quote, All you had to do was look into Elsie's eyes when she mentioned the good shepherd sisters to understand how prevalent the culture of fear was. The nuns were the masters and the women, Elsie and thousands of others were treated like small school children. So, Yo, how dark is it when you're playing hungry, hungry hippos?

Your fucking game was assembled by hungry, hungry, actual fucking women. Yeah, being whipped by nuns, forced to sleep in the cold outside in the Irish winter. Because they didn't put together the operation board fast enough. Yeah. And you're putting together operation when for sure, if you got sick, they would not pay for an operation. They just kill you and burn you and put you in the mass grave. Then sometimes dig you up and rebare you in another mass grave. Thanks, nuns.

Not even rest in peace for your ass. Just rest in wherever the fuck they put you until they move you again. Yeah, you shouldn't even be resting. You didn't do enough work for free for the Catholic Church to profit. For real? Even though they were already worth more than most nations. Honestly, shock. They didn't sell the remains as like fertilizer.

They might have. They might have. Don't turn another dollar. I'm not going to say categorically that the Catholic Church never sold the corpses of people that they let die for fertilizer. I'm not willing to make that statement categorically, because it's a Catholic Church. Yeah, because give us another like five years. We're going to dig up some more mass graves. That's for damn sure.

Now, in recent years, the Good Shepherd Order has admitted to running a board game sweatshop during the Reagan years. They made a statement to the Sunday Times about it. In the 1980s, Hasbro entered into an agreement with the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford to provide materials for packaging by our residents. The residents who participated in this activity were regularly given what was then known as their Hasbro money envelope. So put a pin in that money envelope comment, because we're going to circle back to that soon. Now, we don't know exactly how long this went on, but the most detail I found suggests that the arrangement between Hasbro and the Good Shepherd Order continued for more than 30 years, which means well into the 2000s, some version of this was still happening. Now, I think it might have gotten better.

It's hard to say exactly how long it went on. But Hasbro, who currently has a market cap of $8 billion, claims they had no direct commercial involvement with the order. They claim that their business relationship was with a charity called Rehab, which purports to help disabled people enter the workplace. It seems odd defining incarcerated by a church for burying a child as a disability. Do you have to remember that a lot of disabled people were also incarcerated by the Catholic Church up until the 1990s? Really gives. I don't want to go to rehab like a whole ass of their meeting. Yeah, I don't want to forcibly labor for the Hasbro corporation. Yeah, I don't want to make fucking mousetrap until I fucking die. JP O'Malley's reporting on this is the best that I found. He succeeded in talking to two other women who had worked at assembling board games for the Good Shepherd Order.

I should note that one of these sources experiences predates the order's relationship with Hasbro. This first particular case, she was incarcerated and was assembling board games through the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. We don't know what company they were making board games for, but they described the experiences of their time laboring there as extremely traumatic. Quote, she had packaged games probably sometime in the 1970s, she admitted. This vagueness is a common theme with many of the survivors I interviewed. The past is so painful they try to erase it from their memory as best they can. The work involved, she said, literally a PTSD symptom that is like well known now. Yeah, the work involved, she said, putting pieces in small bags.

We received 50 pence for pocket money, the woman explained. We put all of our work into boxes quickly and then the nuns would have someone count them. If you didn't go fast enough, you had to stay longer. Sometimes men would come in and talk to the nuns and watch us do the work too, she added. Another woman, resident in the Good Shepherd Convent in Waterford from 1963 to 1968, claimed she packaged games too. Were there any wages for the work? No money, just food, she told me. Now, you might define making people labor and just giving them food and not money as not paid labor. I don't know if there's another word for not paid labor that you can't choose not to do. We'll put a pin in that. No, that doesn't seem right.

Slavery, slavery, slavery. Oh good. Oh yeah, nailed it. Yeah, perfect. Really, really getting the good Irish music here. So I must again reiterate that none of these either of these women were making board games during the Hasbro period. I don't know what company they assembled games for. So Hasbro may be telling the truth when they say their incarcerated single mother laborers were paid for their work. But J.B. O'Malley also talked to a source who he kept anonymous who claims to have been an employee of Hasbro, Ireland for five years during the 1980s. Her mother had also been a resident of the Good Shepherd Convent in Waterford and had previously worked at the Magdalene Laundries. And this Hasbro employee told J.B. O'Malley, quote, I can assure you those women who worked in Hasbro, Ireland from the Convent, that was their life. They worked longer hours than the factory women, women, but the packaging work was always done on site in the Good Shepherd Convent.

I presume the women didn't have any work contracts because any money they got went through whoever was the mother superior in the Convent at the time. She went on to clarify that whatever cash the women received was pocket money rather than wages. So again, some of these women almost certainly were not paid. It depended on whether or not the nuns wanted to give the money. You assume a lot of the nuns just took the money Hasbro gave them, but Hasbro can claim these women were paid for their labor, because it's not their job to make sure these women get paid for their labor. I love plausible deniability. Oh, baby, plausible deniability is the petrol that capitalism runs on.

Oh, if you didn't ask us about the things you needed, why should we give them to you? Oh, wait, you didn't ask. It doesn't matter. We still won't. Yep. Corporations. That's for my upcoming musical corporation. Yeah. Oh, I'm excited for it. I love the tagline at the end.

Yeah. And you actually execute the Pope on stage during that, if I'm not mistaken. I sure do. I sure do. And then I hold up his head like Kathy Griffin did with Trump. And that is how I hope to get canceled. So fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. And I'll start opening for Louis C.K. because that's how cancellation works. You just start being a right wing comedian.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm excited to. I hate that for you. Just so you know. I hate it. I fucking hate it. No, it'll be amazing. Who else has been canceled? No one's been canceled. I'm going to start working for Cosby. It's perfect. You're not going to start working for... Oh, my God.

Yeah. It's going to be a double act. Me and Bill Cosby, his rejuvenation tour uncancelled with Bill Cosby. That's what we're going to call it. You know who wasn't canceled? Was the Catholic Church. Yeah. Hasbro also not canceled for any of this. I want to keep reading your script.

Yeah. Now this was controversial. The unpaid labor forcibly managed by nuns was controversial among regular Hasbro Ireland employees because around the same time the company laid off a number of full-time workers, the basic allegation is that Hasbro fired salaried employees to pay women being abused by the church pennies to do the same work. So basically they fired people getting fair wages and quote unquote hired incarcerated women and then bribed the nuns to force them to work is the allegation.

I'm sure Hasbro would say we paid the nuns through this company a fair rate for the work. And what happened after that? If the nuns mistreated them, we couldn't have known. But also how fucked up when someone else makes you a scab? Yeah. Like you don't even have a choice. You don't even know you're scabbing, yeah. You're like getting like fucking dp'd by fucking like truly like Hasbro and the Catholic Church.

Yeah, you're like this is... Yeah, that's fucking... That's so fucked up. Everything's already so terrible for you. And again, as a matter of like legal shit, we can't confirm or deny that Hasbro themselves did anything improper or knew about any improper working conditions. The fact that women weren't being paid.

They may have dotted their legal eyes and crossed their legal t's. But I should note while making this caveat that in 2009 the Guardian reported on the fact that Hasbro has repeatedly been charged with human rights violations due to its inhumane factories in China. So not out of the question either. Think about it. We're not saying anything, but you got it. Yeah, so I can't say to a point of certainty that the Hasinfeld Brothers toy company knowingly and with great malice aforethought took advantage of a system of indentured servitude

to force abused women to labor and board game making sweatshops well into the 21st century. But I can say maybe they did. So, yeah. Over here playing hungry, hungry single mothers. If you want to support the pod, we'll take your money Hasbro. We'll take your money, but only in the form of a bear cat armored vehicle. Come on Hasbro. Send me send me an armored vehicle and all is forgiven.

Well, I feel like there's a lot more ways they could actually make it up to us. Well, just have to be an armored vehicle. That's the only thing that'll work for me. But I'll do it for anybody. Like if the British government wants wants to wants to have me stop shitting on their their terrible genocidal empire. Send me a Sarasen armored vehicle. We can make a deal like a yes. And we're like, that's the minimum, but then we want to shit.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll try to negotiate up. If I can maybe get two Sarasens, maybe get a leopard, you know, I think you need to get off the armored vehicle train. Once you get one armored vehicle, I think you're all set. I will stop talking shit about Tsarist Russia. If they send me an armored train like the Tsar had. So that is the train that I love trains. Absolutely.

I will take that amendment. Hell, yeah. Armored trains. Look, you can buy behind the bastards, but it's going to cost you armored vehicles. When I worked at YouTube really quickly, I just want to say. Really quickly. I just want to say that when I worked for YouTube and I had to like sort and rate YouTube videos. I mean, when I worked for Google and I had to do that for YouTube videos, one of the things that was so popular for Russian YouTube was videos of trains.

And it's just the camera steady and it's just the train going by for 12 minutes. And I have to say it was one of the most soothing times of my day when I have to watch a 12 minute train video. Oh, yeah. Anyway, that's it. Yeah, trains are nice because absolutely no one was ever worked to death in huge numbers to allow them to exist. Sure, they're peaceful. That's the best thing about trains. That's what's great about them.

No one ever died for trains. No guilt. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a big sip of coffee and open my book of Chinese American History. It's API month is over. What's happening? You can go ahead and just forget about that now. You know who won't force thousands of laborers to work to death building train tracks and inhumane conditions? These goods and services.

Unless it's literally any train company, in which case they did. Anyway. Sorry about it. Other than Amtrak, I don't think Amtrak did. Probably not, right? Amtrak spine ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back and we're talking about industrial abuse of women and children.

So we've talked a bit about, you know, the Magdalene Laundries, the industrial schools, and the industrial schools held a mix of children who were incarcerated for, you know, some in some cases, behavioral issues. Kids who were taken from single mothers, kids who couldn't be adopted. You know, the lucky kids got sent off to parents in foreign countries, mostly the United States, in a business that was very lucrative for the child, for the Catholic Church, and is distinct from child trafficking for reasons that are unclear to me. These were, again, the lucky ones because the children who were trafficked by the Catholic Church in many cases probably got treated like human beings by their families, probably in a lot of cases at least. They did better than the kids who remained in the Catholic Church's custody because the children who stayed in these industrial schools were not as fortunate. I found the story of one young woman named Mary, who was taken from her mother as a very small child. She was so tiny, she had to stand on top of a pile of stacked pallets to reach the sink and do her job, which was washing dishes. Oh, sorry, which was washing sanitary napkins. That was the job they gave her.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. Now, because Mary was a sinner. At least let her get her fucking period before you make her wash period shit. She probably thought it was just a bunch of women dying from their fucking vaginas, everyone. There were a bunch of women dying, so that makes it better. It's true. Not for the reason she thought. So the nuns did not respect Mary enough to refer to her by her name because she was a criminal. So like all the other girls in the industrial school, she was given a number.

Hers was 1346. Again, these are nuns. These are nuns doing this. She was beaten regularly for misbehaving. The worst beating she could recall when she was interviewed by the BBC was the time when she and another girl asked an older child who had just been put in the institution what it was like to go to school. A nun overheard. They were told to go back to work. Later that night, Mary and the other girl who had dared to ask about school were called in by the nun and beaten with a stick and a leather strap. She lashed at me and told me, you're not to talk to people.

Now, some days, Mary would be sent to work on a farm for the day. She was not fed on those days, and she was so hungry that she would often sneak chicken feed. As she grew older, the nuns forbade her from looking at her developing body. They forced her to wear a wrap around her chest to flatten her breasts, and she was made to wear a red petticoat while she bathed. As we've noted several times already, the mortality rate in these schools was extremely high. The most credible estimates suggest at least 9,000 children died in Catholic Church facilities as a result of neglect over the course of the 20th century.

This is a mortality rate of roughly 15% of all children brought into the system. While a number of these deaths occurred at industrial schools in the Magdalene Laundries, the deadliest of the Church-run institutions during this period were probably the mother and baby homes. These are where single mothers were put while pregnant, and while their infants were too young to be separated from them until the babies were old enough to be adopted off or sent to another institution. The very worst of these facilities, and the County Cork reported that 75% of the children there died before their first birthday. This is in 1943. 75% of the kids in this facility died before their one.

Which is, if you were just shooting at children, you would have a lower death rate than that. Those are some insets group in numbers. Like, Jesus Christ. Those stats are not interesting. You have to try to kill babies to hit 75%. I'm going to quote from Reuters here. Anonymous testimony from residents compared the institutions to prisons where they were verbally abused by nuns as sinners and spawn of Satan.

Women suffered through traumatic labors without any pain relief. One recalled women screaming, a woman who had lost her mind in a room with small white coffins. So that's good. Oh my God, lost her mind in a room of small white coffins? Yeah, just surrounded by baby corpses. What a cool new nature for me. Not a cell phone in sight, living life, you know. Well, death, but you know.

Now, very confusingly in, it's a good article, but it has a confusing phrase that it opens by noting that alongside thousands of deaths and forced child separations, quote, children were vaccinated without consent. This doesn't seem like it belongs with the rest of that, because who would consider vaccinating a child with or without consent on the same plane as murdering children? Well, don't worry. Well, a lot of people now. But actually, this is just kind of bad phrasing, weirdly bad phrasing at the start of the article.

The vaccine story is actually super fucked up and absolutely worthy of inclusion, because it wasn't that they were vaccinating children. What actually happened, and again, Reuters does go into this later, is that institutionalized children were used as guinea pigs for experimental vaccines without their consent. Holy shit. Yeah, it's fucking rad. There were at least 13 separate child. That's fucking mangal-ish shit.

Now, it doesn't go as bad as mangal-ish stuff. That is one of the things I have to say about this, because I think they were testing actual vaccines as opposed to mangal-ish, just doing murder nonsense. There were at least 13 separate child trials for diphtheria, polio, measles, rubella, and other shots. Now, none of the, and again, some of the children, most of the children in these trials, were children from general society whose parents consented to them being part of the vaccine trial. But also, a bunch of the people in this were children in the mother and baby homes. Some who were just 15 years old, some of the mothers were just 15 years old, were not asked to give consent.

This was generally justified by the fact that these mothers had mental health issues or psychiatric disorders. So, normal moms have to consent to have their parents part of this experiment. The children, mothers, and the mother and baby homes don't need to be asked for consent, because they have mental problems, according to the nuns who are beating them. Now, again, whether... According to the nuns who are beating them is an incredible sentence. We don't know if any of these women were diagnosed by an actual doctor who had any kind of credibility to have any kind of psychiatric issues.

Not that that would have made it okay. I'm just making the point that these diagnoses seem to have been just handed out by nuns and priests, a large number of whom were child molesters. So, documentation on these trials is notoriously sketchy, but just based on what I've sniffed around it is a definite whiff of shit being covered up. That said, there is no hard evidence of any serious harms due to these tests. There is one case of a child from one of these homes who died of cardiac and respiratory failure two weeks after receiving a vaccine.

The commission that investigated this said that the death did not appear to have been linked to the vaccines. And again, these facilities are killing babies left and right. So, there's a good chance that the baby died just because of other mistreatment. And yeah, it's cool. So, again, as I noted, about 43,000 children in total took part in these trials. Most of them were from the general population and their parents were reached out to for consent, and that consent was documented. This was not the case of children from the mother and baby homes.

I'm going to quote from the Irish examiner here. The commission noted, and this is an investigation later, noted that Dr. Hanley, who did the vaccine tests, emphasized the importance of obtaining written consent prior to treatment and provided a breakdown of the number of consent forms returned in each school. No child was immunized unless a written parental consent form was produced. However, Dr. Hanley made no mention of consent, written or otherwise, in respect to institutional children.

So again, like, why would you give a shit? Obviously, consent matters unless you're one of these kids that the Catholic Church owns. Then who cares? It's good. It's great shit. It's pretty dope. Now, one of the articles I found on this noted that in the 40s and 50s, it was common across Europe and the United States

to use institutionalized children as guinea pigs for vaccine trials. In the US and Canada, this often meant indigenous children who had been separated by their families forcibly to be de-Indianized. This is not the story we're telling today, but it's worth mentioning that that happened. We've talked about the residential schools before. This is a thing that happens outside of Ireland to children who are forcibly incarcerated in institutions with similar death tolls to these homes in Ireland. And a lot of times in the US and Canada, it's indigenous kids.

And, yeah, it's interesting that because of how fucked up the story is, the part where we're talking about using child slaves as medical guinea pigs is the least dark part of the story. This is the least body count of anything we're talking about, including probably Hasbro. But now it's time to go back to the dead babies, specifically the mass graves of dead babies. Now, the most... Well, thank God. I really was wondering if you've been inviting me for a reason.

You texted me the other day saying, Robert, my hands are shaking. I haven't talked about mass graves of dead children in months. What am I? What do we got? I got to get a fix. That's what I said. And I showed you my dead baby track marks. And I was like, look, I got to get back in the game.

I got the need. The need for dead babies. I got to chase the dead baby dragon. You got to chase the dragon. The dragon is a baby's corpse. Of course. Yeah. Now, the most infamous mass child grave covered up by the Catholic Church in Ireland is probably

the one at St. Mary's in the village of Twam, which is colloquially known as the home. This was a child and mother home run by the Bon Secours nuns from 1925 to 1961. In 1961, the home closed down and its child inmates were sent to nearby industrial schools. The building was bulldozed and low income housing was put up on its site. In 1975, two children were playing on the site, the former site of the home. They found several concrete slabs, loosely covering a hollow. Being young boys, they moved the slabs and discovered a hole underneath it. They crawled inside and realized to their horror that it was, quote, full of skeletons of children.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Good shit right there. It seems like the kind of thing where your mom's like, OK, can you not do this shit you've been doing? Can you not go out? Can you not like go into caves that you should be in? See, you're shameless. You go fucking around in caves and you're going to find dead babies.

And then you go in the cave and you find literal skeletons of other children. That seems like your mom planted them to just like drive her point home about what you should not have been doing. That shit is so creepy. Yeah, it might be one of those things where, like, as a child, you decide to stop exploring after that, like, you know. Yeah, no fucking shit. You just sit in your room and become a fucking indoor kid like immediately. Yeah. You're like, I like computers now.

I don't know how to learn how to code. I can't go outside anymore. It's full of skeletons. It's full of dead children out there and I cannot. These boys find a hole full of baby skeletons and they go home to tell their families. Now, the church immediately gets involved here and they do what they do best, which is hush things up. A priest does a mass at the burial site and the grave was covered again, more permanently this time. There was no investigation into what had happened or who was buried there.

But the people of Tuam didn't forget. From the journal.ie, quote, a local couple began to take care of the small patch of land, erecting a grotto in the corner and maintaining it for 35 years, trimming the grass and planting flowers. Stories continued to spread about the bodies and the institution that put them there. Similar stories spread all around Ireland, dipping into the cultural unconsciousness like tap roots into soil. Now, in 1976, the year after these kids find this mass grave, a pair of journalists from the Irish Times start making inquiries about the still ongoing programs like the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries. One of the journalists who started this investigation was inspired to do so because her husband, a psychiatrist, had a young female patient who became hysterical the moment a nun entered the ward. This psychiatrist was savvy enough to be like, she starts screaming and freaking out the instant a nun walks in, there might be something here. Perhaps I should tell my journalist wife to look into this.

I love that that's like sadly like our lowest like expectation of anyone. The bar is so low. We're like, I don't know. I mean, Kudos to, he didn't have to do this. Should I have let it go? He didn't have to be like, this probably should be looked into a little bit. She's shrieking in agony at the sight of a nun. This might deserve an investigation.

So he starts talking to, he starts talking first before he goes to his wife, he starts talking to this young woman who's become hysterical at the sight of a nun. And he starts asking her like, why? And she, in his words, persistently described witnessing the savage, bloody beating of a little girl at the orphanage she was sent to. This girl eventually disappeared and she believed the girl had been killed and buried in a mass grave after being beaten to death by the nuns. From the Irish Times, quote, By chance, my friend, Mavis, also a journalist, this is the other journalist in this team, had a young woman from the same place living with her, waiting for the birth of a baby. At 16, like all the girls, she'd been sent away to work as a domestic, utterly ignorant of the world and vulnerable to male predation. She told Mavis about horrifying cruelty and deprivation at this institution by then closed.

It was often described as one of the good schools. Gradually, we discover the context that Ireland had been infested with these places, all run by religious orders. We learned that some still existed and that they operated with state funding through the Department of Education under the 1908 Act's regulations. They were designed to protect, feed, clothe, and educate children in state care. So these two journalists set out to investigate the scope of what was going on in these facilities. They made requests to the Department of Education to find examples of children's diet plans and punishments that had been recorded. Because the 1908 child protected law had mandated you have to, if you're running one of these facilities, you have to document what you're feeding these kids, and you have to document how you're punishing them so we know if you're violating human rights or not.

So they go to the Department of Education and they go with these facilities. They'd heard stories from and say, what were these kids being fed? How were they being punished? The documentation is legally required to exist and the Department of Education is like, oh, I'm sorry, there's no available documentation. Which, hmm, as a journalist, hmm. So these journalists, who are great journalists, ask next for records of children sent out to work from the age of 10 on. They were told that these reports did not exist. They were asked by what process it was decided that girls would be sent to labor in the Magdalen Laundries. They were told by a representative of the Department of Education, oh, we'd better not delve into that terrain.

I also feel like, I mean, I guess the Nazis kept kind of good records. Well, they did try to burn them all, but yes, for a while. But I'm just saying, like, overall, we shouldn't really expect the perpetrator to have great record of their crimes. I mean, sometimes, but generally when they know shit's about to like hit the fan, they're like, better make sure this doesn't exist. So it's kind of fun when people just like turn to a bad people and they're like, hey, could you give us evidence of you being bad? And they're like, no, sorry, somehow that evidence is gone. Yeah. It's like, well, yeah.

Yeah. So the government's stonewalling forced these women to dig and they uncovered a bunch of horrifying shit, including the fact that in 1943, 35 children had died in a fire at an industrial school in Kavan. Now, they found transcripts from an inquiry into the fire that showed the government closing ranks to protect the nuns. Over and over again, they found a quote, absence of accountability and casual law breaking at these facilities. They got documentary evidence of the late minister of education, Brian Linehan, concurring with a referent mother's demand that a girl be illegally imprisoned in an institution. So again, the government is entirely complicit in this. These reporters started working on a book about their findings and they were heavily discouraged by basically everyone they knew. Here's a quote from them describing the reaction they got for most people.

It'll upset the good sisters. What's the point? Everything's different now. So again, it wasn't, again, it was the 80s when the Hasbro Company was using these women's labor. So their book was published in 1985. It's like that Simpsons quote about the Germans were like, sure, they've made some mistakes in the past. But that's why pencils have erasers. That's why pencils have erasers.

Literally. Exactly that. You know what else has erasers? You know what? We can't promise that. But probably these goods and services don't need erasers. Yeah. These goods and services, I will say at least a 70% chance we're not complicit in covering up crimes against humanity. That's the behind the bastards guarantee.

Guarantee. All right. Let's do this. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, we're back. Having a great time. So these reporters published their book in 1985. It is poorly reviewed, slammed by everyone as an unfair and unhinged attack on the noble nuns and priests doing difficult work. We, of course, now know that every word of it was true. And it's probably worth drawing a line between how this book gets slammed by people and what happens to Senado Connor when she tears up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live. She's just universally attacked by fucking everybody for being just an idiot and like, oh, she's just a crazy woman who's being disrespectful to this wonderful institution. These good holy men. And now we know that every single pope who's ever been the pope has been complicit, openly complicit in covering up the mass rape and murder of children.

Every single one of them, not one excluded, including the popes you like. Fuck them all. Fuck the pope is the motto of the behind the bastards show. That guy in St. Petersburg who shot John Paul II. Not on the wrong side of things. That's my stance on shooting John Paul II. Also, there is some sort of wildly crazy mental gymnastics that you have to do to like be like an incredibly rich and closed city and incredibly rich like fabrics and all this fucking shit on your whole thing is to be like humble and whatever. Oh, yeah.

I did to every second of your day as just yet the mental gymnastics you must do as a quote unquote representative of God to make that make sense. Is I'm like, all right. I'm a humble Samoan fucking Biles. I'm a humble servant of the Lord who happens to live in his own independent nations with billions of dollars in gold and riches buried secretly beneath it guarded by Swiss mercenaries. What is the problem with that? How does that how does that not say humble servant of God to you? For real. You live to Swiss mercenaries.

It's the Swiss mercenaries, isn't it? You truly live in some shit that sounds like a fairy tale and at no point you're like, huh, is this something I'm perpetuating that is precisely against what I pretend God is? Maybe I should take a knee and fucking renounce all this bullshit. No. Okay, cool. I'll just ride in around in my weird bulletproof copemobile. A fun thing to do with the high up leadership of the Catholic Church. I'm not saying this about necessarily every single priest.

Because there are definitely parishes and stuff where there weren't molestation. And as we've talked about in our episodes in the school of the Americas, there were heroic Catholic priests and nuns who fought against these right wing death squads and acts of genocide in places like Guatemala. And I don't mean to like, I'm not saying every single Catholic Church official is complicit in this, but everyone at the highest level leadership of the church absolutely is. Everyone who is running the Vatican, every pope knows about this shit and is complicit in covering up and every year we get more evidence of that. Every high level Catholic official is a part of not just this, but the mass child molestation, every single one of them. And if you start to come up with defenses for them, replace the word Catholic Church with Nazi Germany and see if those defenses sound like things that defenders of the Wehrmacht say when they're trying to claim that there were large chunks of the Nazis who weren't complicit in the genocide. It's the same shit. And also they ran the Catholic Church, they were part of it.

And also Catholics were part of. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a complete. The actual Holocaust and they were and genocide that is part of World War Two. I mean, in fairness, though, it doesn't matter how you slice it. You have to there. You have to separate the church in Rome from the Catholic Church, large parts of the Catholic Church in Germany, who were a big part of the resistance to Hitler. And in fact, the three groups that Reinhardt Hydrick, the architect of the Holocaust, targeted in Germany were activist clerics, which were Catholic priests that were anti Nazi, the Jews, obviously, and Freemasons. So I don't want to like, again, outside of Germany.

Yeah. But yes, with the Catholic, the Pope at that point, there's a bunch of fucked up shit, you can say. Yes. I just I never want to be the Catholic part of the problem when you're trying to condemn the Catholic Church is inevitably people will be like, well, what about this heroic priest who gave his life protecting? It's like, yes, I'm not saying he helped cover up mass child rape. I'm talking about the popes. I'm talking about the bishops. I'm talking about the people in charge of talking about the organization itself and the way it conducted itself.

Yes. And that is equivalent to a lot of other organizations. We're not we don't say every Israeli person, every Jewish person or whatever. Just like when we talk about US war crimes, I'm not saying that your uncle who was drafted at age 18 is responsible for the deployment of Agent Orange on the jungles of Vietnam. In a lot of ways, he's a victim too. But like, yeah, it's it's the organization. Everyone running the organization of the Catholic Church is complicit in this. And that's cool and good, Sophia.

It's not. I think it's incredibly devastating. And I'm glad I started drinking. Yeah, it's a good time to be drinking 2021. Just the whole year. So a big part of the reason why the horrors of this system are now widely known has to do with a single woman from the village of Tuam and not to white, not to wash out those brave journalists who did the important work of documenting this. But that got kind of covered up in the 80s. Tuam is again where that child mass grave was uncovered.

And this woman's name is Catherine Corliss. She grew up hearing the whispered stories about that mass grave, which had been so efficiently hushed up and covered up by the church. She started to investigate in the early aughts. And I'm going to quote from the journal.ie here. Corliss works on her family farm. She didn't have an academic institution behind her. Instead, she worked on it in her spare time. On a rainy day, I'd really get down to it and go to work in the library, she said.

She initially tried to contact the Bonsecours sisters at their Cork headquarters and was told that they no longer had files or information about the home. She tried the Western Health Board, who told her there was no information available. When she tried to access information from Galway County Council, she says she was told that she wasn't allowed because she didn't have a university degree. That's exactly what I was told. I couldn't look at the records. But the council would let her look at the information about the housing estate, which had been built over the ruins of the old home. And from this, from this information about the housing estate, she was able to piece together data about the original site. She eventually hit upon the idea of going to the registry office in Galway to get death certificates for every child who had perished at the home.

Her contact at the office called her a week later and said, Do you really want all these death certificates because you're going to be charged for each of them? And there's a fuckload of them. Corliss was charged four euros for each death certificate she requested. Between 2011 when she started requesting them and 2013, she came up with 796 deaths. They ranged from newborns to nine-year-old children. The death certificates gave causes raging from malnutrition, neglect, measles, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. The number of deaths and the time the home was operational mean that one child died there every 15 days.

By overlaying a map of the site, as it looks today, with plans for the old building, she realized that the mass grave discovered in 1975 had been built in the old location of the home's sewage tank. So when they demolished the building, they stuck all the corpses in the sewage tank. That's good. Very respectful. Life matters, Catholic Church, famed advocates of the sanctity of human life. Rest in this sewage, tiny babies. Rest in this literal shit pit, you babies that we didn't feed.

It was the mass graves at Twam that finally sparked widespread public outrage over what the Church had been doing in Ireland for decades. This is not to say that the crimes of the residential school system were unknown prior to that point. There were obviously a lot of stories. Come in, that book had been written in 1985. There were stories of sexual abuse. There were stories of brutal punishment that had come out. Sinead O'Connor had done her thing.

And in 2001, which is like a decade before she starts finding these death certificates, the Catholic Church had agreed to put 100 million euros into a special state fund for victims of abuse. Now, this was not because they recognized they'd done bad and wanted to make it right. This was because in 2001, they were finally starting to get evidence out about all of the well-documented rapes that Catholic priests had carried out. And so as part of this agreement about dealing, hushing up the rapes, the Church puts 100 million into a fund. And they say, we're also saying this fund is going to go to people who were abused in our residential schools because they're going to start suing in a few years. And in order to receive these funds, they have to be barred from suing the Church directly.

This is an agreement they make with the Irish government. The Irish government is like, you guys were raping a lot of kids. You need to do something about this. They're like, OK, here's 100 million. Also, people are going to try to sue us for the other horrible shit we did. Make sure that if they take money from this fund, they agree to not sue us. That's fucking cool, right? Good shit, Catholic Church. Now, the part of the legal requirements around the funds ensured that only victims of sexual abuse and not physical abuse could receive funds. So we talked earlier about one of the women whose story inspired those journals to start their investigation,

watched a little girl get beaten to death by nuns. If that girl had survived, she wouldn't have been she wouldn't have gotten any money. She wouldn't have been because she didn't get raped, right? Again. Holy fuck. Good shit from the Catholic Church. Real nice to be able to quantify abuse like that. Now, the fact that they tried to lock all this down and put the funding out in 2001 was very savvy of the Church. Because, of course, they were well aware that as the stories of mass child sex abuse by priests had broken containment,

so too would the whole story of the industrial schools, the Magdalene Laundries, and the mother and baby homes. By making a deal in 2001, they protected themselves from the fallout when, in 2013, a comprehensive government report on the horrors of the industrial school system was finally released. 2013 is the year when the Irish president, or whatever, Indakini, apologized for the state's role in the horrors. Church representatives also came out and expressed their horror at how bad the things they'd done were. A new government scheme was announced to give out lump sum payments from 11,500 euro to 100,000 euro, based on a woman's length of stay in an institution. This benefits package fell well short of what the 2013 report had recommended,

and it also contained a ton of caveats, enough that many victims of the system did not qualify for funds. To date, only about 29.8 million euro has been paid out to just 770 applicants, most of whom got the full 100,000 euro because that's how many people were profoundly abused by this system. And the Catholic Church is still, let's look up the expected net worth of the Catholic Church. Let's all have this journey together. How much is the Catholic Church worth today? Get ready to hear some imaginary fucking numbers. Yeah, because we don't know, because they've hidden it all underground.

Banker's best guess of the Vatican's wealth, this is 1965, put it at 10 billion to 15 billion. So that's 1965, is the estimate, is 10 to 15 billion. It is so much more than that. Yeah, here's a 2015 article, how rich is the Catholic Church? It's impossible to tell how much real estate does the Catholic Church hold. What are its equity holdings? We just don't fucking know. Welcome to the fucking imaginary numbers game. Yeah, oh fuck, this is fun.

In the 1960s, Italian media uncovered evidence that the Vatican had invested in entities that conflict directly with the Church's holy mission, including Instituto Pharmacicocerono, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, and Udyne, a military weapons manufacturer. There have also been unconfirmed rumors of church money in firearms manufacturer Beretta and companies with activities in gambling and pornography. It has been linked with dealings with Nazi gold during World War II as well. Yep, there you go. Fucking rad, baby.

You love to hear it. Good shit. Yeah, but it's cool. The Vatican passed its first law against money laundering and terrorist group funding in 2011. Oh, 2011? So they've been on this for a long time, obviously. Yeah, this is important to them, et cetera, et cetera. Fuck the port.

Hypocrisy pays, baby. Yeah, it does. It does. I don't know. This has been a profoundly anti-Catholic article or episode of my podcast. Yo, if I ever start being against shit that is profoundly immoral, will you just, like, come to my house with your many knives and machetes and just fucking murder me? Yeah, let's do it. I'll even leave a note that says that's what I wanted.

Mm-hmm. Because, like, holy fuck. Yep. You know what isn't holy, fuck? Are these goods and services murderous to a side pack related? It's your pup. It's your plugs. Your plugs. Your plugs, Sophia. Your beautiful, perfect plugs.

Wow. If you want to be murder-suicided by my comedy. There we go. There we go. It's the smooth transition Robert Evans' show is known for. Mm-hmm. Y'all should get my stand-up eyeball. Smooth as a dead baby's head because it never got enough nutrition in order to grow hair. And then it was buried in a mass grave along with 795 other babies.

Wow. You know what's the opposite of a soft spot is my comedy. It's hard as fuck. Jesus. All right. It is hard as fuck. You should download my album. You can buy it.

It's called Father's Day. It was number one on iTunes. You can get it wherever you buy albums, but also SophiaAlexandra.com. And you should check out my other two podcasts. It's 420 Day Fiancé with Miles Gray of the Daily Zigeist where we talk about 90 Day Fiancé. And Private Parts Unknown where me and Courtney talk about love and sexuality around the world. And we just went to Belize. Yep.

Check it out. Yeah. Belize, a place where nothing bad was ever done by colonial powers. Yes. That is true. And it is in no way completely devastated by the lack of tourism because of COVID. Because in no way is 40% of their GDP from the aforementioned tourism. Yep.

I'm back. Hey. Bye. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.

Hi. Hey, everybody. Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com. But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave. And it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem. I mean, activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling

stations, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at Free Fridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks, they could really use it. Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after

I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this. So please Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do. For more time, the Venmo is at Free Fridge Salem. Just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it ready. We'll be right back.

Thank you.