“The past,” William Faulkner wrote, is never dead. It’s not even past.” That quote, from “Requiem For A Nun,” is brought to mind by today’s New York Times story on how the Irish are dealing with the grisly discovery that the bodies of hundreds of young children were buried in a mass grave in an abandoned septic tank. The perpetrators? Catholic Nuns. And we’re not even talking about the distant past here; the burial ground was the location of the Taum Mother’s and Children’s Home from 1925 to 1961. Five plans have been offered on how to deal with this, from simply putting up a memorial to exhuming and identifying every single human remains. The question has been roiling both the Church and the Irish government. About the only people you can imagine seeing a bright side to this are the scores of priests who have either been defrocked or protected after allegations of child abuse, who are probably looking into the mirror and thinking, “not looking so bad, now, am I?”
Not everything dug up out of the ground is so depressing—In Lincolnshire, the East Midlands, England, a Bronze Age cremation urn was discovered in an archaeology dig just off a motorway. The urn, which is believed to be over 3,000 years old, was excavated and removed without disturbing its contents. Scientists hope to use them to find out the age, gender, even what might have killed the person whose remains were stored in the urn. There have been no reports that disturbing this burial place has led to any ancient curses being unleashed.
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