わからない
Singing Nun Wins Italian TV Talent Show
And just after midnight Thursday, Sister Cristina Scuccia, the Sicilian singing nun who has become a worldwide sensation, won the second edition of the TV talent competition “The Voice of Italy” after singing a rousing version of “What a Feeling,” the Oscar-winning song from the 1983 film “Flashdance,'’ accompanied by a chorus line of dancers dressed as monks, who threw off their habits to reveal pastel-colored suits.
“My dream is to recite Our Father together,” she said upon winning, intoning the Lord’s Prayer, while the show’s judges shuffled their feet and mumbled, visibly embarrassed. The show’s host noted her “very original way” of accepting.
On the wave of the global success of her video singing Ms. Keys’s “No One,” viewed online by 51 million people since it was posted in March, Sister Cristina’s victory — with more than 60 percent of the votes cast — came as little surprise, even as Italian media unfailingly jibed that she may have had a little help from above.
The bigger question mark in a country where some polls suggest that a majority of Italian women aspire to television fame is whether success will go to the head of the 25-year-old nun, possibly leading her astray from her calling. Winning the competition, after all, comes with a recording contract.
“There are plenty of people guiding her who will help organize her artistic activity. I think she has a lot of support,” said Claudia Koll, an actress who enrolled Sister Cristina at the drama school she runs at a nunnery in Rome after hearing her perform. “She is supported by prayer and by people, so she’s not as much at risk as people think,” Ms. Koll said in a telephone interview.
At a news conference on Wednesday with the finalists of ‘'The Voice,'’ Sister Cristina said that she would follow the orders of her superiors regarding her future, which could include tours or recording contracts. She said that if asked to, she was ready to return to the church choir where she sang before becoming a sensation.
United Earth
So, it seems there's a small caveat to that story about nuns throwing 800 dead children into a septic tank:
It's almost certainly false.
edited 8th Jun '14 10:13:43 PM by Warron
HGW XX/7
Doesn't look like a particularly objective article. It's pretty unconvincing too, boiling down to semantics and a piece of statistical trickery. Looks like the same routine we heard when the Magdalene laundries were exposed.
Still, a public inquiry into the Mother-and-Baby Homes has been promised, which I suspect will be...interesting.
edited 9th Jun '14 3:03:46 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei
No. it's not an objective article. It's a pro-Catholic blog. I was going to link to the article in the Irish Times (here), but I linked to Caroline Farrow's blog because I thought she did a good job summarizing the issue, and I like her theory that the bones are of famine victims who were dug up during construction. But in any case the story isn't convincing. The idea of 800 bodies being stuffed into a septic tank strains credibility and the person who discovered the remains said this:
“But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.”
It seems that someone took the discovery of the remains, took Catherine Corless's research that showed that 796 babies died at the orphanage, and jumped to the conclusion that the remains were the remains of all 796 children. We don't even know that the bodies discovered were children.
Obviously this doesn't change the fact that child mortality rates in Catholic orphanages were unacceptably high (though they were high throughout all of Ireland at the time) but the specific claim being made here- that nuns buried 800 child bodies in a septic tank- seems to simply be untrue.
edited 9th Jun '14 7:57:59 AM by Warron
HGW XX/7
Corless did an interview with RTE where she advocated that the septic tank contained a substantial quantity of children, so she has only herself to blame if that is the case.
The article in general looks like the same pattern of denial we saw from the Catholic press post-Magdalene. Start by seizing on inconsistencies or minor details as though they discredit the whole story, then make some nebulous mention about how "it was rough everywhere" as a red herring.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
NOT THE BEES
I'm pretty sure once you start nitpicking over how many hundreds of children you found buried in the septic tank, you're well into the type of mathematics where ten and one hundred are roughly the same thing for any practical purposes.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the difference between "possibly twenty or so" and "nearly 800" as a "minor detail", when the 800 number is apparently the total number of children who died there over the 35 years it was in operation.
I'm not saying that "only 20" makes it all fine and dandy. I'm saying that's a pretty huge discrepancy to not give a hard looking-at to.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
United Earth
That's not "American libertarianism", that's properly called capitalist anarchism or anarco-capitalism and yes, Catholicism as I understand it (although, as Madrugada will testify, I make a habit of misunderstanding religions) is obviously and patently incompatible with a branch of ideologies that, among others, have proposed that freedoms and rights can be bought and sold, that the only elements of the State worth maintaining are the repressive, violent ones, and that if you don't have the money to pay for food, shelter, or medical treatment, you should be left out to die as a matter of principle.
Heck, one of them even advocated for a Free Market of Children, on the premise that it would be better for them. And he has the gall to call the book "The Ethics of Liberty".
edited 12th Jun '14 11:54:56 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
HGW XX/7
Well, its certainly relevant insofar as its always best to have the historical picture be as close to reality as possible. But the deaths of the children aren't in doubt, nor is their burial in some kind of unmarked grave. The issue here is "were they buried in a septic tank or not?" Which seems less relevant than the fact that they are dead in the first place.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
@The Handle: It's a consequence of considering absolute self-ownership as the highest right. The Church (nor anyone else I can think of) does not recognize such an absolute right. Within Christianity, all your rights ultimately come from God.
I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies
United Earth
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That detail... how is it relevant? What does it entail, in practice?
Zzzzzzzzzz
According to some (admittedly brief) research, yes, there is some question as to whether the bodies in the tank were even from children who died in the home, or whether they were older bodies (either famine victims or children who died there while the building was a workhouse not run by the Catholic Church prior to the nuns beginning to use it in 1927) that were put into the tank during the excavation that would have been done when the building was added to the public water system in 1937.
@Handle: What it means is that Christians believe that people have a moral obligation to do some things because God Said So. Some of these obligations, for Catholics, include a command to proscribe things that libertarians consider fundamental rights.
For example, it's a position of the Catholic Church that abortion must be forbidden, and that Catholic politicians are obligated to attempt to enforce that law upon everyone they can, regardless of the religion or position of their constituents; conversely, libertarians believe that they can do whatever they want with their own body, including getting rid of any unwanted fetus inside of it.
edited 12th Jun '14 5:43:30 PM by Ramidel
Indiana Solo
Zzzzzzzzzz
This is NOT going to become an abortion thread!
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Indiana Solo
might have wanted to say that to him then.
Honest question (and tangentially related), how big is that septic tank? Because some basic and conservative math shows that to hold 8 hundred bodies, that thing would have to be huge. I estimated 2x1x1 cubic feet per body, which gives a grand total of 1600 cubit feet, which is about 12 feed per side. I don't know much about septic tanks, as I've always been connected to a sewer(or out camping in the mountains), but I thought they were small, a couple of feet at the most.
edited 12th Jun '14 7:03:15 PM by sharur
Nihil assumpseris, sed omnia resolvere!
In practice, it means that there are certain things that humans can not take away from other humans. Like an opportunity for redemption, or freedom of conscience. Exactly what those rights are has changed from era to era, but the underlying idea that certain moral obligations have been given to us, and we aren't free to abandon them, hasn't changed.
For example, a Christian can answer the question "Where does the right to life come from? What's is it's origin?" One can agree or disagree, but at least you know where we come from. I'm not sure what an American-style libertarian would say to that question. Why do we have an absolute right to self-ownership?
I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies
Zzzzzzzzzz
It has not been made public how big the tank itself is, but a guy who was one of the kids who first found it in the early 70's said the concrete slab covering it was "about the size of a coffee table." He also has said "800? No way there were that many. Maybe 20, at the most." I know that the septic tank at my old house was about 6 by 8, and maybe 5 feet deep, so about 250 cubic feet.. And a septic tank doesn't do what it's supposed to do if it's filled with solid stuff.
Joe, he was using abortion as an example. You were the one who started talking about it on its own.
edited 12th Jun '14 7:36:59 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
わからない
Catholic Social Teaching uh...teaches that the right to life is a natural right. It's natural. Natural doesn't necessarily mean "divine" however.
CST is a relatively new thing from the church, barely a decade old IIRC.
I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.
And, to any who complain... meh: he just needs to hold up the memo from the boss.
edited 6th Jun '14 1:22:46 AM by Euodiachloris