The Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours is a Roman Catholic religious congregation for nursing (gardes malades), whose stated object is to care for patients from all socio-economic groups. Reflecting their name ("bon secours" means "good help" in French), the congregation's motto is "Good Help to Those in Need."
In 2014, the news media ran a series of articles about the order, relating to a mid-20th century maternity home for unmarried mothers which it ran in Tuam, Ireland. The home had a high death rate from childhood diseases and malnutrition (including marasmus-related malnutrition), and it was claimed that many of the dead children might have been buried in a mass grave on the site. Excavations in 2017 found an "underground structure divided into 20 chambers", containing the remains of children up to three years old. This area is labeled as a septic tank when overlaid with maps from the workhouse era, and had been decommissioned in the 1930s. Examination of the bodies found that they dated from the 1920s through to the 1950s. The judicial Commission of Investigation that ordered the excavations stated: "The Commission has not yet determined what the purpose of this structure was but it appears to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water. The Commission has also not yet determined if it was ever used for this purpose." Carbon dating confirmed that the remains date from the timeframe relevant to the operation of the Mother and Baby Home by the Bon Secours order. The Commission stated that it was shocked by the discovery and that it is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way.
History
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The congregation was begun by Archbishop de Quélen of Paris in 1822, and was formally approved by Pope Pius IX in 1875. Although its patients were expected to pay as much as they could afford, the congregation provided nursing free of charge to the poor. According to their founding constitution, "After the personal sanctification of its members, the principal aim of this pious society is the care of the sick in their own homes". Its nuns traditionally wear a black habit and a white cap with a frilled border and black veil.
By 1913, there were sixteen houses of the congregation in France, four in Ireland, one in England, two in the United States, and one in Belgium. Founded with governmental approval during the monarchic and Catholic Bourbon Restoration period, the congregation became a target of anti-clerical governments during the early 20th century.
The foundress
The congregation's foundress, Joséphine Potel, was born on March 14, 1799 in the small rural village of Bécordel in Northern France. At the age of 22, she traveled to Paris and was moved to pity by the suffering she observed. At that time, France had been shaken by centuries of political, social, and religious upheaval â€" including, most recently, the French Revolution. The violence of the Revolution â€" particularly the Reign of Terror - had taken many lives and left psychological scars. With the rise of philosophers including Voltaire and Rousseau, who criticised organized religion and the clergy, faith in religion and the Catholic Church had decreased significantly among many of the French people.
With rampant poverty among France's lower class, healthcare for the poor was scarce and low-quality. When people fell ill or were injured, they avoided the hospitals, which were seen as death traps and often had filthy, prison-like conditions. Care, if available at all, was usually provided by a family member with little or no experience caring for the sick. With overcrowding and a lack of sanitation, diseases spread quickly through city streets, afflicting rich and poor alike.
Wanting to combine her strong Catholic faith with her desire to serve those in need, Potel joined a group of women involved in caring for the sick and poor. However, the group was a secular organization, and its members did not wish to take religious vows or incorporate spirituality into their work. In order to create a similar organization rooted in Catholicism, Potel and eleven other women formed the group that would become the Sisters of Bon Secours, choosing Potel (Sister Marie-Joseph) as their leader. Contemporary norms held that nuns were supposed to either remain in the convent or at least return by nightfall if they ventured out into the world. Consequently, when the Sisters applied for acceptance of their new congregation by the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Paris was skeptical. After persistent efforts by Sister Marie-Joseph, the Archbishop eventually granted the Sisters a one-year probationary period.
Early days
Despite the divisions between social classes in French society at the time, the Sisters cared for rich patients in large estates as well as the poor, avoiding distinctions based on socioeconomic status. In addition to providing care to the sick, among hungry families, the Sisters would also share their food with patients' hungry family members, striving to help bring health to everyone in their patients' homes, not just the actively ill. Furthermore, among the ill, the Sisters took a holistic view, considering not just the body but also the mind and spirit of each patient, and aiming to bring healing to the whole person. Another radical view at the time, this approach, along with the group's extension of care to the patient's family, distinguished them from traditional religious congregations operating at the time. Also a unique element of their work was the Sisters' practice of remaining with the terminally ill throughout the dying process, reflecting parallels with modern-day 24/7 home care and hospice care.
Word of the Sisters' work spread quickly throughout Paris and the surrounding countryside, and the Sisters were sought out by other women who, inspired by their work, wanted to join the institute. By the end of its first year, eighteen new members had joined, bringing the number to thirty. Impressed by the institute's success, Archbishop de Quelen officially recognized the Congregation of Bon Secours on January 24, 1824. On May 6, 1826, Mother Josephine died. Three days later, on May 9, the congregation's first leader was buried and Angelique Geay was appointed Superior General, taking her predecessor's name, Mother Mary Joseph, as have all subsequent heads of the Congregation.
Growth of the congregation's mission in France
The Sisters reached a major milestone in 1827, when the French Bourbon government legally recognized them as the first association of nursing religious individuals in the country. Following this milestone, the demand for the organization's services continued to grow. In 1829, Mere Geay established a new group of twelve sisters in Lille, and the following year the Sisters began a ministry in Boulogne. Three years later, at the Archbishop's request, the congregation took over an orphanage in Paris.
As the Sisters’ numbers continued to grow, they moved in 1833 into a larger home in Paris, which still remains the Mother House headquarters. Meanwhile, France continued to be subject to epidemics, wars, and social upheaval. After the King of France was exiled during the Revolution of 1848, the former King's palace became a hospital where the Sisters cared for the wounded; they also tended to the injured on the streets of Paris. Similarly, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Sisters cared for the wounded and dying on the battlefield and brought them into their convents to convalesce.
Europe
In addition to extending their work around France, the Sisters of Bon Secours began to expand beyond the country's borders due to international demand for their services. In 1861, Ireland became the Sisters' first foreign foundation. The order would go on to open residential institutions for unwed mothers, one of which was much later found to have been unsanitary and prison-like. Nine years later, the congregation was invited to establish themselves in London. The Sisters would also be asked in 1948 to bring their home nursing services to the people of Scotland, and also to open a home for the elderly in Glasgow.
It owns Bon Secours Health System, one of largest private for-profit hospital groups in Ireland and has a substantial property portfolio.
The United States
The Sisters of Bon Secours' arrival in America came about because of a honeymoon gone awry in the late 1800s. A newlywed couple, the Whedbys, were on their wedding trip in Paris when the bride fell ill. An English-speaking Bon Secours Sister nursed her back to health, and the couple was deeply impressed with the care she provided. Upon returning to the States, the couple spoke to some prominent area physicians, who contacted Archbishop Gibbons of Baltimore to request that the Sisters be asked to practice their ministry in the United States.
Approving of the request, while on his way to Rome to become a cardinal, Archbishop Gibbons stopped in Paris to ask the Sisters if they would be willing to provide their home care services in Baltimore. In 1881, three Sisters sailed to the United States, and in the following year they opened a convent in Baltimore on the site of the present Bon Secours Hospital.
As hospitals became the preferred place of treatment, the Sisters broadened where they cared for the sick and dying. Soon the Sisters were building their own health care facilities. By 1916 the Sisters were staffing a home for crippled children in Philadelphia. In 1919, they opened the Bon Secours Hospital in Baltimore, their first hospital in the U.S. They began formally training young women at the Bon Secours School of Nursing in 1921.
The United States Province
In 1958 the Congregation of Bon Secours in the United States became a separate Province. As the twentieth century progressed, the sisters responded to people's changing needs, opening convalescent homes, running clinics and mobile health care vans, caring for the sick in rural areas and those struggling with addictions in inner cities.
Throughout the 1980s, the Bon Secours Health System grew rapidly, opening a number of hospitals, community health clinics, nursing care facilities for the elderly, alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation centers, affordable housing units, and medical office facilities in Maryland, Virginia, Florida, and Michigan in response to the needs of the communities they served. To ensure the system remained true to its essential mission of providing care for the whole person to all people in face of such growth, the sisters developed new processes and positions within the system focused on mission and core values.
South America and Africa
By the 1950s and 1960s, the Sisters had begun to expand into the Third World with work in South America and Africa. In 1957, at the request of an African bishop, the Sisters opened a home for sick children in Chad, working also to educate mothers and reduce the infant mortality rate. Nine years later, the Irish Sisters of Bon Secours began the institute's first work in South America after the Bishop of Cork and Ross took responsibility for a shantytown on the Peruvian coastline and invited the Sisters to minister to the populace there.
They opened a mission in Riobamba, Ecuador. Like the previous decade, the 1990s were a period of tremendous growth within the Bon Secours health system, adding more than 15 new hospitals and nursing care facilities, many joint ventures with other religious congregations dedicated to health care.
Activities
Currently, the congregation works in France, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and operates private for-profit healthcare in Ireland. Within the U.S., the order operates in nine states: Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home controversy
Between 1925 and 1961, the order operated Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (also known as St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home), a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children in Tuam, Ireland. In 2014, news media reported that the bodies of 796 children and babies who died of malnutrition (including marasmus-related malnutrition) and disease were suspected to have been buried in a former septic tank on the site of the home. The child mortality rate at the home during certain local epidemics had averaged up to two a week. Medical reports at the time listed the cause of death as disease or disease-induced effects.
Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, had obtained death records for 796 children who had died of various diseases and malnutrition (including marasmus-related malnutrition) at the home â€" an overall rate of 22.1 per year between 1925 and 1961, and finding no trace of their burial in any of the local graveyards, she inferred that they probably were buried on the property. However, she had not uncovered a mass grave or evidence of mistreatment. In 1975, two local boys had lifted a concrete slab and seen the skeletons of "maybe twenty" babies. While Corless speculates that the pit in which the skeletons lay may have been part of the sewage tank installed by the workhouse in 1840, eighty-five years before the Bon Secours sisters took it over, she told the Irish Times, "I never used that word, 'dumped'. I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were 'dumped' in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words. ... I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own." Still, figures for 1947 from the National Archives showed that the death rate of children in Bon Secours, during the preceding twelve months, was almost twice that of some other mother and baby homes.
The death records obtained by Corless had established the identities of those who died in the home. She concluded that their bodies had been buried on the St. Mary's property, and she set up a fund to build a memorial for the site. Bon Secours sisters are said to have donated money for this purpose.
On 4 June 2014 the Irish government announced it was forming a panel of representatives from a number of government departments to investigate the deaths at the home and propose a course of action for the government to take in addressing the issues.
Charles Flanagan, the then children's minister, said the inquiry would be charged with investigating burial practices, high mortality rates, forced adoptions and clinical trials of drugs on children in four suspect homes. In addition to the home in Tuam, so-called "little angel" plots will be investigated at Sean Ross Abbey, Co. Tipperary, Bessborough, Co Cork, and Castlepollard, Co Westmeath.
On 3 June 2015, the Irish Examiner published a special report which claimed that the Irish Health Services Executive had voiced concerns in 2012 that up to 1,000 children may have been trafficked from the Home, and recommending that the then health minister be informed so that "a fully fledged, fully resourced forensic investigation and State inquiry" could be launched. The issue had arisen within the HSE when a principal social worker responsible for adoption discovered "a large archive of photographs, documentation and correspondence relating to children sent for adoption to the USA" and "documentation in relation to discharges and admissions to psychiatric institutions in the Western area." The HSE noted that there were letters from the Home to parents asking for money for the upkeep of their children and notes that the duration of stay for children may have been prolonged by the order for financial reasons. It also uncovered letters to parents asking for money for the upkeep of some children that had already been discharged or had died. The social worker had compiled a list of "up to 1,000 names." HSE reports mentioned the possibility that children had been trafficked for adoption with one speculating that it was possible that death certificates were falsified so children could be "brokered" for adoption.
On 3 March 2017, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation announced that human remains had been found during a test excavation carried out between November 2016 and February 2017 at the site. Tests conducted on some of the remains indicated they had been aged between 35 foetal weeks and 2â€"3 years. The announcement confirmed that the deceased died during the period of time that the property was used by the Mother and Baby Home, not from an earlier period, with most of the bodies dated to the 1950s. The remains were found in an "underground structure divided into 20 chambers." The Commission "said it had not yet determined what the purpose of this structure was but it appeared to be a sewage tank. The commission had also not yet determined if it was ever used for this purpose."
The Commission stated that it is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way, that it has also asked the relevant State authorities to take responsibility for the appropriate treatment of the remains, and that it has notified the coroner. Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone said that the coroner's results would determine the direction of the investigation and that the commission will determine if other sites need to be excavated, including another part of the Tuam site.
The Taoiseach (Irish prime minister), Enda Kenny, described the find as "truly appalling", saying "the babies of single mothers involved had been treated like some kind of sub-species." He commended the work of Catherine Corless in bringing the issue to light. Speaking on the find in Dáil Éireann, in response to requests to widen the terms of reference of the Commission, he described the Mother and Baby Home as "a chamber of horrors."
No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier than thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate. For their trouble, we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them, starved them, neglected them or denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts, our sight, our country and, in the case of Tuam and possibly other places, from life itself.
In the same debate, AAA-PBP T.D. BrÃd Smith called for the Bon Secours order of nuns to be disbanded. She said "its hospital empire, the biggest private hospital group in the State, was built on the bones of the dead Tuam babies." Smith said "everyone was not responsible for what happened in Tuam. It was paid for by the State, which knew exactly what was going on, and there were 'headage payments' of up to $3,000 for each child sent to the United States."
The Taoiseach's speech was criticised by some. In the Dáil, Catherine Connolly directly addressed the speech, stating: "A shocking discovery, according to everyone, and particularly to yourself Taoiseach. But this is something that Galway has been aware of for a long time, highlighted by Catherine Corless back in 2014, in her painstaking and self-funded research. By the witnesses, the many, many women who went before the commission of inquiry into child abuse which culminated in the Ryan Report, as far back as 2009. They told their stories about their experience in Mother and Baby Homes. It was brought to the attention of Martin McAleese when he concluded his report on the Magdalene laundries. So none of this is shocking to the survivors. What is shocking to the survivors, and to me, is the carefully crafted words that you’ve come into the chamber with. And, in particular, that you say 'no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children', 'we gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns' care' and so on. I don’t doubt your bona fides, a thaoisigh, but I certainly doubt your judgement in reading that out, a carefully crafted speech with a sentence like that in these circumstances. My question: please answer. Where is the interim report that has sat with the minister since September last year? Please confirm that the site will be sealed off as any crime scene is sealed off."
Editor Brendan O’Neill called for "an appraisal of the facts":
There is something deeply disturbing, ghoulish even, in the media and political discussion of the Tuam mother and baby home. ... The discussion of Tuam has been unhinged for some time. In 2014, when researcher Catherine Corless first speculated, correctly, that children were buried at the home, a writer for the Derry Journal said: “This is our nation’s holocaust.†Pat Flanagan at the Irish Mirror referred to it as “our own little holocaustâ€. The use of the H-word is especially disturbing. The Holocaust was the conscious, murderous destruction of a people. Using it in relation to Tuam implies the nuns killed children, casually, on a mass scale. There’s no proof for any such thing. ... That the “structure†had 20 chambers suggests it had been turned into a kind of catacomb. That the children buried there were “swaddled upâ€, as one eye-witness described it, suggests they were not simply "dumpedâ€. That the discovery of the structure in the 1970s was followed by a priestly blessing and then the setting up of a grotto by local people suggests the town of Tuam, and Old Ireland more broadly, was not a foul place but rather had many good people in it, concerned for the dead.
The Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, stated that "the discovery is an infinitely sad reminder of an Ireland that was a very harsh, harsh place for women and their babies" and that "it shows the tortured relationship the State and church had with pregnant women - it is a tragedy that we are now facing in its entirety."
The Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, said that he is horrified by the confirmation that significant quantities of human remains were buried on the site. He said he had been "greatly shocked to learn of the scale of the practice during the time in which the Bon Secours ran the mother and baby home in Tuam."
The Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference apologised for the hurt caused by its part in the system, which they said also involved adoptions. They said that "the appalling story of life, death and adoptions related to the Mother and Baby Homes has shocked everyone in Ireland and beyond."
The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, said "there are dark shadows that hang over our meeting, shadows that require us all to summon up yet again a light that might dispel the darkness to which so many women and their children were condemned, and the questions left unanswered as we moved on." President Higgins described Catherine Corless' work as "another necessary step in blowing open the locked doors of a hidden Ireland."
Grove Hospital
Some Tuam residents have now called for an investigation into the town's Grove Hospital, which had also been run by the Bon Secours order. A number of people have claimed their children or siblings were buried on the site from the 1950s right up until the late 1970s, although the order denies that there was a graveyard on the site. Galway County Council has stipulated that an archaeologist must monitor excavation work on the site in order to preserve any remains which may be buried there.
See also
- Convent de Bon Secours, a historic building in Washington, D.C.
- Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home - the children's home in Ireland where up to 796 children are believed to have been buried in an underground structure divided into 20 chambers that "appears to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water."
- Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation - the judicial investigation into practices at the above Home and other such Mother and Baby Homes
References
External links
- Sisters of Bon Secours Vocations
- Sisters of Bon Secours US Province
- Sisters of Bon Secours Spiritual Center
- Sisters of Bon Secours International
- Bon Secours Health System, Inc.
- Tuam Mother and Baby Home website
- Tuam Archival newspaper clippings and photographs
- Radio Foyle Interview with Catherine Corless, 27 May 2014
- BBC Our World 2014 documentary Ireland's Hidden Bodies Hidden Secrets, by Sue Lloyd-Roberts
- List of 796 children who died at the Tuam home (scrolling video)
- List of 796 children who died at the Tuam home (text)
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Institute of Bon Secours (de Paris)". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton.Â
- Barry, Dan. (Oct. 28, 2017). Ireland Wanted to Forget. But the Dead Don’t Always Stay Buried. The New York Times. [1]
