Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland are under fire after a research revealed that the bodies of almost 800 children were over the years piled into an unmarked, mass grave outside a former home for unwed mothers and their children.

The women who were sent to “the Home” operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, County Galway, from 1926 to 1961 were exploited for unpaid labor as a way to atone for their out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Many of the women had been told their children were adopted.  But the macabre truth was that the children died of various causes over the 36 years of the home’s operation at a rate of one every fortnight, and twice a week during World War II.  Their bodies, abandoned in a septic tank that served as a mass grave.

And the children who lived were treated horribly.  Sickly and malnourished, they were segregated and treated as pariahs at church-run schools.  Local health board reports from the 1940s described the children as “emaciated,” “fragile”, and “poor, emaciated and not thriving.”

Unfortunately, the harsh conditions at the church-run home were not unique in Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The Magdalene Laundries were in the news a year ago, because the Irish government finally saw fit to compensate the women for compelling them through the judicial system to be forced labor for the church.