RITE AND REASON:THE ANNOUNCEMENT by Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin that it intends removing "personal effects or borders and establishing a commemorative garden on the site of the current Angels' Plot" has come as unwelcome news to many older bereaved parents, who have placed "personal memoriams" on the approximate location of their babies' graves.
It may be desirable from an administrative view to “grass the area and form a well-tended lawn”. The current Angels’ Plot with its haphazard, pockmarked landscape, loosely littered with a wide variety of personal memoriams, is not a pretty sight.
It looks more like the scattered detritus of a battle zone. But this represents very closely the reality of what transpired to bring such a place into being for very many parents, some of whom have chosen to ease their grief with little shrines.
Many of these are of a religious nature due to an overarching fear that many of the babies may never have been baptised. This is now a historical fact for many older parents.
Allied to the above is the recent publication of yet another report on postmortems and organ retention, which highlighted significant shortcomings at the Rotunda Hospital.
It has apologised and issued letters to families affected and set up help lines for callers from any era.
Glasnevin Cemetery has always been particularly sensitive in dealing with Angels’ Plot, where many thousands of newly born babies are buried in mass graves. Indeed procedures and protocols at maternity hospitals, including those of religious services, have improved radically in recent years in the area of perinatal death.
The Irish Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society, composed mainly of parents who have been bereaved, has been hugely responsible for advising professionals on improving standards in dealing with this issue.
The Methodist Church was one of the first churches to approve a funeral and naming service for stillborn babies.
Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork was wont to preach of an unbaptised baby, “it won’t have the happiness, it is true, that it would have had had it been baptised, but it will have a certain measure of natural happiness all the same”.
He was criticised for his statement by some, most memorably by Fr Joe McVeigh, who wrote, “does Dr Lucey the Bishop of Cork and Ross think that he is God?”
I deemed Dr Lucey’s words “an insult to Jesus Christ who died for all of us”. Limbo hung heavily over bereaved families for many generations. In 2005, the present pope said the “concept should be abandoned as it was only a theological hypothesis and never defined truth of faith”.
In 2007 the Catholic Church published The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die Without Being Baptised.
It could only offer that “there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness, even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question in revelation”.
The findings of the report into organ retention at the Rotunda, “the flagship Dublin maternity hospital”, might make one despair, given the history of successive investigations.
Were it not for the heroic campaign by Parents for Justice, it would appear the professionals involved would continue proceeding in the certainty they knew what was best for bereaved parents.
- Anthony Jordan is an author. His autobiography, The Good Samaritans – Memoir of a Biographer, is published by westportbooks@yahoo.co.uk