Monday, July 7, 2014

IN TODAY'S PDN. VOICE OF THE PEOPLE. THE TUAM STORY.

The following was printed in the Voice of the People, Guam Pacific Daily News, Monday, July 7, 2014 and reprinted here with permission. Here is the link to the original letter by Paul Zerzan and the link to the letter from Fr. Walsh.


AP apologized and corrected Tuam story

On June 29, the Pacific Daily News published a scathing letter from Paul Zerzan taking Fr. Francis Walsh to task for his expose on the connection between Martin Luther and nominalism.
Zerzan, however, did nothing to refute Walsh's proposition, but rather launched into a hit piece spuriously connecting Walsh and his church to the alleged discovery of 800 dead children whose bodies were reportedly dumped into a septic tank at a Catholic orphanage in Tuam, Ireland, in the 1920s.
On June 20, The Associated Press, which first carried the story, issued an apology with the following corrections:
• That the infants had not been baptized. Documents proved that many were.
• That Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to children of unwed mothers. It wasn't.
• That most of the remains of the children were interred in a disused septic tank. They weren't.
As for the last point, the researcher who originated the story admitted that it was impossible to know how many remains, if any, were interred. Get that? "If any!" In fact, the whole story originated from a single investigator's sketchy summary, pieced together from local rumors and posted on Facebook.
As evidenced by the AP's grasping at the least bit of unverified minutiae to trash the Catholic Church, Zerzan is not alone in his hatred. However, now that The Associated Press has issued an apology for the story, shall we also expect one from Mr. Zerzan?
TIM ROHR

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