Feast of the Innocents

by Gerelyn Hollingsworth

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A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. Matthew 2:18

It is a fitting day to mourn the Innocents who were kicked, beaten, stripped, starved, tortured, raped, worked to death, and buried in unmarked graves by bishops, priests, brothers, nuns, sisters.

A day to bewail the Innocents sentenced to the Magdalen laundries and industrial schools of Ireland, and for the Indian children confined in boarding schools in North America.

A day to lament the parochial school children molested in sacristies and in confessionals and in rectories and in lake cabins and in cars and on picnics and in their parents' houses.

Some varying perspectives may be found in Sin Against the Innocents: Sexual Abuse by Priests and the Role of the Catholic Church, edited by Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., published by Praeger in 2004.

Contributors to the book: Thomas G. Plante, Michael Rezendes, John Allen Jr., Thomas P. Doyle, Kathleen McChesney, Nanette de Fuentes, A. W. Richard Sipe, Gerald D. Coleman, John Allan Loftus, Dovid Clohessy and Michael Wegs, Donna J. Markham and Samuel F. Mikail, Curtis C. Bryant, Leslie M. Lothstein, John C. Gonsiorek, William C. Spohn, Kirk O. Hanson.

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