CORMAC MURPHY O'CONNOR

YESTERDAY IN WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL IN LONDON THEY BURIED THE 85 YEAR OLD CARDINAL CORMAC MURPHY O'CONNOR - A MAN WITH NOT ONE - BUT THREE IRISH NAMES.

His family was originally from County Cork.

Here is what the editor of the English Catholic Herald said about him:

THE CATHOLIC HERALD by Luke Coppen

Tall, imposing and jovial, the cardinal moved skilfully through Vatican corridors

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor took on leadership of the English Church amid political and ecclesiastical turmoil

There was an unnerving moment during Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s installation at Westminster Cathedral in March 2000. The new spiritual leader of Catholics in England and Wales stumbled on the marble altar steps, and it looked as if his 6ft 4in frame would come crashing to the ground. But at the last second he caught himself and carried on. This was, with hindsight, a fitting metaphor for his choppy years as Archbishop of Westminster.

Murphy-O’Connor’s appointment to England’s premier see was a surprise. He had been preparing for retirement, not national leadership, when he received the nuncio’s call. Yet he was a shrewd choice, because he embodied the unique character of English Catholicism. In him, the Church’s two historic wings – Irish immigrants and the aristocracy – met and were reconciled.

He bore not just one but two Irish names thanks to his grandfather, who joined his surname with his half-brother’s when they went into the wine trade. Despite being born in Reading, Murphy-O’Connor spoke with an Irish lilt and had the easy charm associated with his ancestral land. Yet Clifford Longley once described him as “every inch a dog-walking, golfing, rugger- and piano-playing English country gentleman”. Though firmly middle class (his father was a doctor from County Cork), he moved comfortably in upper-class circles. He became a friend of the Duke of Norfolk during his more than two decades as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, and England’s senior Catholic layman is said to have helped him to Westminster.

Cardinal Basil Hume, the popular 9th Archbishop of Westminster, was perhaps the first to see Murphy-O’Connor’s full potential. In 1999, on his deathbed, he told him: “Cormac, you will have to take over this job.” Under Hume, the English Catholic Church had grown in confidence, if not in overall numbers. To be a Catholic was no longer to be a suspicious outsider. His unpretentious Benedictine spirituality resonated with the English and he welcomed an influx of high-profile converts, as well as hundreds of ex-Anglican clergy. Hume’s establishment project – his desire for Catholics to find a place at the heart of British affairs – had advanced further than he could have hoped.

After Hume’s passing, Murphy-O’Connor took up the project enthusiastically. Following the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, he became the first cardinal for centuries to read a scriptural passage at an English royal funeral. Later that year, at Sandringham, he was the first Catholic cleric since 1688 to preach a sermon to the reigning monarch. He considered taking a seat in the House of Lords and even prepared the opening of his first speech (“As my predecessor, Cardinal Pole, was saying …”). But he declined the offer after Rome vetoed it. He initially criticised the Act of Settlement, the law barring Catholics from inheriting the throne. But after a backlash he dropped the matter, saying that the Act would be quietly discarded one day.

Like most English bishops, Murphy-O’Connor broadly welcomed the ascendancy of New Labour in 1997, after almost two decades of Tory rule. He thought that the Church could help the government, led by the Catholic-friendly Tony Blair, to repair Britain’s frayed social fabric.

It was not to be. In 2006 Alan Johnson, then education secretary, tried to impose a quota of non-Catholic pupils on new Catholic schools. An outcry, led by bishops, resulted in what one observer called the “fastest U-turn in British political history”. The following year, with Cabinet ministers still smarting, Murphy-O’Connor asked for an exemption from gay adoption laws. Blair’s power had by now melted away and he was unable to find a compromise. The Church was forced to close or cut ties with its adoption agencies. This brute display of secularist might angered the cardinal. In one of our final email exchanges, he said that he still felt strongly about the episode 10 years later.

Murphy-O’Connor had taken the Hume project as far as it could go. It was true that the Establishment was no longer fiercely Anglican, but it had been invaded by an aggressive secularism no less hostile to the Catholic Church. Full admission required the abandonment of Catholic principles. Murphy-O’Connor had come to believe that it was better to remain at the margins. “There is still a sense that being Catholic is being different,” he told me in 2012. “You’re not part of the Establishment and most Catholics wouldn’t want to be.”

Murphy-O’Connor longed to unify England’s Christians. Tears had filled his eyes when Dr Robert Runcie welcomed Pope John Paul II to Canterbury Cathedral in 1982. He was not alone in thinking that this symbolic moment would be followed by the recognition of Anglican orders, leading to intercommunion between Catholics and Anglicans. As co-chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), he saw one obstacle after another topple – until the Church of England voted to ordain women priests in 1992.

His soaring hopes then gave way to a good-natured realism. Rome and Canterbury wouldn’t become one in his lifetime, but he insisted that ecumenism was a “road with no exits” (an unsettling image, but one that got across the sense of permanence). Rarefied theological dialogue was giving way to an “ecumenism of life”, in which the faithful worked side by side as if they were already united.

His greatest trial came a few months after his installation at Westminster, when the media discovered that he had mishandled an abuse case in Arundel and Brighton. In 1985, he had appointed Fr Michael Hill as a chaplain to Gatwick Airport, despite reports that the priest was a danger to children. Hill had wept, got down on his knees and begged Murphy-O’Connor to give him a new post. Viewing himself as a spiritual father and Hill as a wayward son, he gave in, characteristically letting his heart overrule his head. At Gatwick, Hill abused a boy with learning difficulties and was convicted of nine counts of indecent assault in 1997. Murphy-O’Connor came under pressure to resign the See of Westminster, but never seriously considered it.

While others might have felt compelled to step aside, he accepted full responsibility for his error and tried to ensure that bishops would never again reassign abusers. He asked Lord Nolan, an authority on probity in public life, to review the Church’s child protection procedures. Nolan urged the Church in England and Wales to adopt some of the most stringent measures in the Catholic world. Despite complaints from clergy, who felt the new rules treated them as guilty until proven innocent, the bishops adopted the reforms. This marked a breakthrough for Murphy-O’Connor, who otherwise struggled to impose consensus on the bishops’ conference. But it put new strain on his relationships with priests.

Murphy-O’Connor’s openness to married clergy and his belief that condoms were sometimes licit in the fight against Aids placed him at the liberal end of the global Catholic spectrum. While he had great reverence for John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he felt they had stifled some of Vatican II’s revolutionary insights. He took Cardinal Hume’s place in the St Gallen group, named after the Swiss city where like-minded cardinals such as the Italian Cardinal Martini and the Belgian Cardinal Danneels had met since 1996. Members discussed how a new kind of pope might emerge to lead the Church in a more progressive direction.

Murphy-O’Connor’s ecclesiastical career flourished even though he was at odds with Rome’s prevailing conservatism. That was because of his Romanitas: his intuitive ability to navigate Vatican corridors, developed during his years as a student in Rome and then as rector of the English College. Although he often froze in front of the cameras, he was fluent and funny in ecclesiastical settings. With his imposing height, firm handshake and jovial storytelling, he resembled one of those formidable Irish-American bishops who flourished in the last century. Like them, he also had a calculating side just visible beneath the bonhomie.

Only occasionally did his instincts fail him: at a dinner with cardinals after Benedict XVI’s election he began what he hoped would be a rousing chorus of Ad Multos Annos. “I thought everyone knew it and they’d all join in,” he recalled, “but nobody did. And so I carried on right until the end, just me, in front of Pope Benedict, and all these cardinals.”

He received the ultimate sign of Vatican approval in 2001, when John Paul II gave him the red hat. Among the others elevated that day was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires. From then on, they were seated together at Vatican events and built a rapport.

Murphy-O’Connor said that his heart leapt when his friend emerged on the balcony of St Peter’s as Pope Francis in 2013. Two days later, in the Hall of Benedictions, Francis smiled and told him: “It’s your fault! What have you done to me?” As he was over 80, Murphy-O’Connor hadn’t voted in the conclave, but he had helped to create the buzz around his Argentine colleague.

He welcomed the austere Jesuit’s efforts to change the culture of the Catholic Church. With a direct line to the papacy, he arguably enjoyed more influence in his retirement than he had ever had at Westminster.

I remember coming away from an interview with Murphy-O’Connor a few years ago with the impression that he envied those mystics who could spend hours in contemplation away from the world’s cares. He had taken a different path: dogged service of the institutional Church. Whether as a curate in Portsmouth or as Archbishop of Westminster, he had simply done what he had been asked to do as conscientiously as possible.

At his eventful installation Mass in Westminster Cathedral, he recalled that he had once found a stone commemorating a Celtic saint in the Outer Hebrides. “Pilgrim Cormac,” it said, “went beyond what was deemed possible.” That would be a fitting epitaph for Murphy-O’Connor himself.

PAT SAYS:

Cormac Murphy O'Connor never rocked any church boats. He was a safe pair of hands and simply a "manager".

His memory will be overshadowed by his appointment of the paedophile priest, Fr Michael Hill, as chaplain to Gatwick Airport AFTER he had already abused young boys.

In Gatwick Hill went on to sexually abuse a boy with learning difficulties in the chapel of the airport.

After Hill got out of prison the diocese of Arundel and Brighton housed him in a church owned apartment three minutes walk from a primary school.

Murphy O'Connor said he did not properly understand paedophilia at the time!

Growing up in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s I knew that paedophilia was "dirty" and wrong.

I do not swallow that "we did not understand paedophilia" lark at all.

Nonetheless, the Catholic Church went on to make CMO'C an archbishop and a cardinal and a pope maker.

At the end of the day, they do look after their own.

Yesday CMO'C was given a big funeral - TICKET ONLY ADMISSION - and will be buried in the floor of Westminster Cathedral.

People who knew him say he was a "nice man".

Is it enough to be a "nice man" ? Is it enough for a Christian leader to be "nice"?

AFTER THOUGHT:

A couple of years ago I had a wedding in the chapel of Trinity College Dublin. An English tourist was surprised to see a Catholic bishop on the steps of Trinity Chapel and came over to me. He turned out to be a next door neighbour of the retired Cardinal CMO'C's in a district in London where the houses were in the multi million bracket. I asked him if he knew his neighbour. He replied:

"No, he does not mix with the neighbours - but after dark, we take a look in his bin to see what wine he is drinking and go and buy it. The cardinal likes fine wines".

Hopefully, there are Michelin Star wine bars in Heaven where they serve Pomerol :-)

AMY MARTIN v DERMO MARTIN

Readers of this Blog will know that I am not a fan of Amy Martin of Armagh diocese.

However, credit must be given where credit is due - and there is a huge difference between how the Armagh and Dublin Martins operate.

Amy Martin, while showing a great weakness on the reform of scandal swamped Maynooth has shown more leadership in his diocese with regard to diocesan scandals than Dermo in Dublin has.

Armagh has had two priestly scandals - both involving senior priests and sexual activity on the Internet.

Amy's Master of Ceremonies, Father Rory Coyle, was found showing his face and his genitals on GRINDR to a young man he had formerly taught religion to as a school chaplain.

As soon as the scandal broke Amy removed Father Coyle from his diocesan appointments and sent him away for help and therapy.

To date, we do not know what, if any, plans Amy has for Rory.

Then along comes Father Eamon McCamley the PP of Keady who was in the habit of exposing himself on the gay website CAFFMOS and occasionally treating his viewers to films of him "relieving" himself.

Very quickly Amy removed him from Keady and has sent him away also for help and counselling and has put him c/o Ara Coeli on the diocesan website.

This Blog knows of at least SIX other Armagh priests in the same boat as Rory and Eamon. I'm sure Amy Martin is also aware of them.

In fact, an Armagh PP contacted me yesterday to say that Amy has appointed three very senior priests to investigate rumours and reports to him and to help him decide on how to act.

Amy has also published his diocesan clerical changes on his website and in the media.

IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT THERE ARE PICTURES OF THE COYLE AND MC CAMLEY EXPOSITIONS CIRCULATING AMONG A SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE.

Compare that to what Dermo Martin in Dublin is at.

DERMO WITH CHRIS DERWIN

His biggest scandal to date is the Deacon Gorgeous scandal and to date, Dermo has not made his intentions about Gorgeous' future known to anyone.

He hid Gorgeous in The Irish College in Rome where, according to all reports Gorgeous had a great time, inside and outside the college.

One rumour says that Gorgeous has departed. Another says that Dermo will ordain him in November?

Then we had the disappearance of Fr Chris Derwin after a short time in Balbriggan Parish and an even shorter time in a Tallaght Parish. The local media carried stories of a "break in", a stolen television and Father Derwin driving the burglar home after the burglary!

Dermo has moved other gay priests in recent times.

But all these moves are IN SECRET!

And Dermo refuses to publish his diocesan changes anymore.

What can account for the difference between the TWO MARTINS?

Is Amy more principled than Dermo. It would be nice to think he was.

Or is it that Amy has a better chance of inheriting a Red hat than Dermo.

We know that \dermo's chances are 1,000,000 to 1.

FATHER MC CAMLEY SENT AWAY

FATHER EAMON MC CAMLEY  who featured on this blog a week or two ago for masturbating on line on a site called CAFFMOS has been removed by Amy as PP of Keady and sent to an unknown location.

One Armagh priest has informed me that Fr McCamley has been sent to the same clinic in the USA that Rory Coyle was sent to?

If you look at the Armagh website you will see Fr McCamley's new address:

KEADY PARISH PERSONNEL:

Amy's problem is that there are least SIX more Armagh priests in the same position as Fathers Coyle and McCamley"!

HOW LOW CAN THE BCATHOLIC CHURCH STOOP?

With a long history of crimes against humanity, Garry Otton wonders if there is any limit to how much Catholic adherents will put up with. 

As much as Scotland’s fourth estate might try to paper over the cracks with whatever the Scottish Catholic Media Office might throw at it, there are no escaping calls from the Scottish Secular Society for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and the Vatican State to face charges for Crimes Against Humanity in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Prior to Herr Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) ‘state’ visit to Scotland – at considerable cost to taxpayers, involving the raiding of funds set aside for overseas aid and coinciding with news of 13 suicides of former victims of priestly abuse in Belgium – former Cardinal Keith O’Brien was pictured in the press laughing, smiling and saying that he would be “happy” if the Pope didn’t apologise for the child abuse. Apparently, there wasn’t very much in Scotland anyway. Oh, really? That was before victims of Fort Augustus Abbey School announced they were launching a lawsuit for compensation for the abuse they suffered at the hands of monks.

Homosexuals; the sixties; ephebophiles, a greater prevalence of incidences in other institutions and secularism have all been trotted out as excuses and deflections for the rot within the Church. Catholic apologists continue to do what they can to lay the blame at someone else’s door. Can they afford to do so any longer following a damning report from the United Nation’s?

Scotland should not forget the allegations against the Poor Sisters of Nazareth filed in the High Court in Aberdeen against Sister Alphonso, alias Marie Docherty. Former children from the orphanage lined up to provide testimonies of daily beatings, sexual abuse from visiting priests, the force-feeding of a little girl with her own vomit, the wrapping of bed-wetters in their urine-soaked sheets, the forcing of a wee girl into a cold bath in the middle of an epileptic fit which Sister Alphonso was supposed to have described as “the work of the devil”, lads being dropped into scalding baths and the ‘cleansing’ of menstruating girls by immersing them in baths filled with Jeyes disinfectant. One woman claimed Sister Alphonso had dragged her by her hair and beat it against a wall so hard it broke her front teeth leaving only the stumps. Helen Cuister told a court that when she began menstruating, Sister Alphonso told her that it was ‘God’s punishment’ for girls who did not behave and that her punishment would go on until midnight when she would die for being so dirty. Louise Clark told the same court how she had been beaten mercilessly simply for not attending church. In defence, Sister Alphonso told the court how, as a child she had pulled down her knickers and asked her father to hit her and, when as a sister in the Aberdeen home, she had given the girls a good talking to after she caught them watching forbidden TV programme, ‘Top of the Pops’. The church stood by Sister Alphonso. A Scottish Catholic Church source told the press: “The view within the church is that she deserves sympathy, not more punishment. The church will rally round her.” And it did. The Catholic Church appointed a team of leading lawyers, including former Solicitor General Paul Cullen, QC and the Rt Rev Mario Conti, the Catholic Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, later the Archbishop of Glasgow, who stepped in as chief apologist, explaining: “Some practices which, today seem excessive and even cruel, would not have been viewed in this light years ago. These convictions do not, moreover, invalidate the great good, which was done by the Sisters of Nazareth, including Sister Marie, in caring competently and appropriately for many thousands of children over the last 100 years”. Still dressed in her nun’s habit, Marie Docherty was found guilty of just four counts of cruelty and unnatural practices. Former care assistant Helen Howie, 75 was angry that she was not called as a witness. “She has made all these children out to be liars”, she was reported saying, “but everything they said was true. A couple of times when my husband came to collect me from his work he had to pull her off to stop her beating the children. I called him many a time to take her away from the children”. Docherty’s age, state of health, lack of previous convictions and the time that had passed since the crimes took place were all taken into consideration. After whispering a polite ‘thank you’ to Sheriff Colin Harris, Marie Theresa Docherty was free to walk away.

But there was also the allegations a decade ago by 11 former pupils in the Court of Session in Edinburgh who claimed to have been brutalised by an order of Catholic monks. Their solicitor, Cameron Fyfe claimed he was handling the biggest abuse case Scotland had ever seen. Allegations from former pupils of St Ninian’s List D School in Gartmore, Stirlingshire described electric shocks administered from a device described as a type of generator kept in a boot room where boys had to hold on to a pair of wires leading from the machine. Central Scotland Police were involved in compiling a report for the Procurator Fiscal that also included complaints of regular thrashings, being forced to eat vomit, sexual fondling and serious physical abuse.

The Big Issue in Scotland at the time reported a particularly harrowing tale by resident John McCorry of the behaviour of the nuns from the Smyllum Park Orphanage near Lanark. “They warped our sexualities. We were told that the toilet – and even using the word toilet – was evil. We couldn’t refer to any part of our body between the neck and knees as anything other than ‘our front’. But as a result kids would get beaten for talking about their fronts. We would get beaten for asking to go to the toilet. It was institutionalised insanity… Boys who wet the bed were beaten all the time… They were forced to drink Epsom salts over and over again. But that ended up making them doubly incontinent. Most of the boys who suffered this ended up soiling themselves a few hours later. The most disgraceful thing I ever saw was one boy who was forced to walk up and down all day in the dining hall with his wet sheet under his arm. The sister who made him do this was shouting at us, saying, ‘Why aren’t you laughing at him?’ There was the sound of forced laughter everywhere. The boy was crying. It was sadistic, sick, mental torture”. The Catholic Church’s spokesman had his secretary explain to The Big Issue: “It’s nothing to do with us any longer”.

But this is just Scotland. Some of the crimes around the world committed in this religion’s name have been horrific. A few years ago in Brazil the Catholic Church was in a pitched battle with the State after a 9-year old girl was admitted to a hospital complaining of stomach pains. Doctors quickly determined that the child, a victim of rape, was pregnant with twins and that her undeveloped uterus did not have the ability to contain one foetus, let alone two. They prescribed an abortion in order to save the little girl’s life. That’s when the Catholic Church stepped in to try and stop it. Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, told journalists that God’s Law was above all human law and that anyone involved in or aiding the abortion would be subject to excommunication from the Church. And so they did.

I want to remind myself of the Catholic Church’s own rule about the Pope’s – the ‘successors of Peter’ – all being culpable. That must include the ones guilty of nepotism, murder, sexual debauchery and general depravity, none of whom the Church has officially condemned. There are the ones who took lovers, mistresses, girls or boys, married, had illegitimate children; housing and promoting their ‘nephews’. Many Pope’s had children. And Pope Julius III hardly made much of a secret about the teenage boy he picked up in the street. First he was his ‘monkey keeper’ and then he was made a Cardinal.

Then there is this Church’s historical hatred of Jews; passing laws that closed professions to them, locking them up in ghettos and forcing them to wear yellow identification. Read about the inquisitions, enforced conversions, slave trading and operations of torture and you are left either needing counselling or wondering what kind of twisted mind would ever want to associate itself with such a poisonous institution. The most obvious explanation has been ‘cognitive dissonance’.

And then there has been the gun-running, the financial wheeling and dealing, the laundering of illegal funds and the Magdalene laundries where women were incarcerated and kept as slaves. Then there has been the denial of rights to women and LGBT people, the latter including boys who were physically castrated in Dutch Catholic institutions in the sixties. Then there were the concordats with South American dictators; the deals with the Mafia (Pope Paul VI’s financial advisor, Sicilian tax lawyer, Michele Sindona recycled proceeds from Mafia heroin sales through the Vatican bank and helped the Vatican evade tax by transferring the bulk of its financial and investment assets overseas). And let’s never forget the Catholic Church’s administration of Nazi rat-runs. Oh, yes… You didn’t even need to be a Catholic to get Vatican help here: Just a Nazi. After the war, funded by Nazi gold, twenty Catholic agencies helped spirit away the likes of the commander of Treblinka, Franz Strangl who murdered 900,000 people; deputy commander of Sobibor, Gustav Wagner who murdered 250,000 Jews and Adolf Eichmann. One of the beneficiaries was most probably Dr Carl Vaernet who performed the most horrible experiments on Jewish homosexuals in the Buchanwald concentration camp in an attempt to cure homosexuals. All this before you get to the endless cases of sexual, physical and mental torture it put children through before the Vatican tried to cover it up, often blackmailing its victims into silence or moving priests to different areas where they could go on abusing more children.

The Catholic Church appears to be an institution that can get away with murder. Literally.

400 CHILDREN DIED IN SCOTTISH CONVENT AND BURIED IN A MASS GRAVE

THE TELEGRAPH 10 SEPTEMBER 2017

Up to 400 children died at a Scottish orphanage run by nuns and were buried in a single unmarked grave, new research has revealed.

The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, which ran the Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanarkshire, has previously acknowledged that 158 children were buried in compartments at a nearby cemetery.

But there have long been suspicions that the real figure was far higher.

Now research carried out by BBC Radio 4's File on Four programme and the Sunday Post newspaper, including a trawl of more than 15,000 official records, has revealed hundreds of children died at Smyllum - far more than the charity that ran it has admitted.

The investigation into Smyllum Park orphanage reveals 402 babies, toddlers and children died there between 1864 and when it closed its doors in 1981.

Most of the children sent to live at the orphanage who died were buried in an unmarked mass grave at St Mary's Cemetery.

Children at the infants' school at Smyllum orphanage, which was opened in 1864

Headstones mark the graves of the nuns and staff members buried nearby but no stone or memorial has ever recorded the names of the lost children.

The revelation that up to 400 youngsters - and some adults - are buried there has provoked calls for Scotland's ongoing Child Abuse Inquiry to investigate.

Former First Minister, Jack McConnell, who, on behalf of the Scottish Government, apologized to victims of care home abuse in 2004, said it was shameful they were still waiting for truth and justice. He said: "It is heartbreaking to discover so many children may have been buried in these unmarked graves. After so many years of silence, we must now know the truth of what happened here."

Former residents have accused the nuns and staff who ran the home of beating and neglecting some of the children in their care.

 Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanarkshire which operated between 1864 and 1981

Their allegations formed part of the campaign that inspired the ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. The charity that ran Smyllum has already given evidence to the abuse inquiry, claiming earlier this year that abuse allegations were a "mystery" with "no evidence" of mistreatment.

The care given at Smyllum will be scrutinized during the second phase of the inquiry starting in November.

The latest revelations have provoked calls for those sessions to include an attempt to detail the children who died at Smyllum and discover exactly how many are buried in the graveyard at St Mary's.

Relatives of children who died at Smyllum are also calling for an immediate ground investigation at the cemetery using ground-penetrating radar to establish how many bodies are buried there.

The new probe involved scrutiny of thousands of death certificates. 

In 2003, burial records given to campaigners by Smyllum bosses suggested 120 children had been buried at St Mary's but relatives believed the figure was too low. The latest figures come after 402 death certificates listing Smyllum as the place of death or normal residence was found in archives.

No details are recorded of the children's lives, apart from their names, date of birth and when they died. Causes of death include accidents and diseases such as tuberculosis, flu and scarlet fever. Some died of malnutrition. The research was carried out by Janet Bishop, of the Association of Scottish Genealogists And Researchers In Archives. She trawled through more than 15,000 official records. Most of the deaths occurred between 1870 and 1930. 

It is believed most of the children, without parents or families able to pay for funerals, are buried at St Mary's.

Checks with surrounding cemeteries and local authorities found only two of the 402 laid to rest elsewhere.

11,601 children passed through Smyllum Park between 1864 and 1981, according to evidence given at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.

The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul declined several requests for the interview.

But, in a statement, it said: "We are Core Participants in the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and are co-operating fully with that inquiry.

"We remain of the view that this inquiry is the most appropriate forum for such investigations.

"Given the ongoing work of the inquiry we do not wish to provide any interviews.

"We wish to again make clear that, as Daughters of Charity, our values are totally against any form of abuse and thus, we offer our most sincere and heartfelt apology to anyone who suffered any form of abuse whilst in our care."

The Scottish Government said, as Smyllum is part of the inquiry, it would be inappropriate to comment.

Six-year-old boy 'killed by nun at orphanage in 1960s'

Police said they found no evidence of foul play in Sammy Carr's death.

A boy was killed by a nun at a Scottish orphanage, a former resident has claimed.

Sammy Carr died in 1964 while under the care of the Smyllum Park in Lanark, South Lanarkshire.

Police Scotland investigated the claims made by a former resident and said they found no evidence of criminality.

But the sisters of six-year-old Sammy are now convinced he was attacked before he died.

Symllum Park has long been the subject of allegations that some of its young residents suffered physical and psychological abuse. The orphanage was run by the Poor Sisters of Charity, now known as the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent De Paul.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry is investigating the facility and four other residential care establishments run by the same order.

When Sammy died, his sisters said they were told he had fallen ill after playing with a dead rat.

The youngster was buried in St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, where more than 150 children from Smyllum lie in unmarked graves. They died from disease or accidents between 1864 and the 1960s.

Now a 63-year-old great grandmother, Sammy's sister Ann Marie Carr said: "The nuns told us he'd died from a tumour in his brain. Something to do with the rat poison through his

They accepted that explanation until 2015, when another former resident told the authorities he witnessed Sammy being assaulted by a nun at the institution shortly before his death.

The 59-year-old now lives in England and has asked for his surname not to be publicised. David agreed to talk to STV News about his claims after Sammy's family gave him their consent.

He told how he and Sammy were playing with matches at the orphanage when they were caught by one of the nuns.

"Sammy was on the floor curled up in a ball and she was just kicking into him, kicking into his back, into his head," said David, who was the same age as Sammy at the time.

"It was proper kicks. I went over and laid on top of Sammy's upper half of his body....I just said, 'Sister, please don't hurt Sammy'."

David said Sammy fell ill after the attack: "It would have to be within days, if not a day. There's no doubt in my heart, she killed him. She didn't kill him there and then but he died days later, or a week later. She definitely killed him."

Sammy's death certificate records him as having died from a brain haemorrhage. David's allegations were investigated by the police. A detective phoned to tell him the results of their inquiry.

"She says we've put Sammy's autopsy report in front of a panel of four people. They've no reasons to suspect foul play. Sammy died of malnutrition and bleeding to the back of the head. I couldn't say anything. My head just emptied....bleeding to the back of the head. Kicking the life out of him. You don't have to be a detective to work that out."

Police Scotland told STV News they had carried out "a robust and thorough investigation and found no evidence of criminality."

Both David and Ms Carr said the police told them the nun involved had died in 2014.

David said: "All I can hope is someone sees this, because there were other kids there, and they remember it, and they come forward and back me up. They're not backing me up, they're backing Sammy up. You're doing what's right."

Asked if she believed her brother had been assaulted, Ms Carr said she was beaten at the orphanage by the same woman: "I got some doings, I got some doings so I do believe it. I got punched, kicked.

"I can't understand why a person at that age, carrying it all this time, would come to the family and say that. They would have just left it and let us believe what we were told."

Of the regime at Smyllum, she stated: "If it wasn't me, it would be somebody else, and you could hear the screams coming out of them, and there wasn't a thing any of us could do about it cause if we tried to do something we got punished as well. "

In a statement, the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul said they were "shocked to learn of the accusations made in relation to the tragic death of Samuel Carr, and have always co-operated fully with any requests for information from the relevant authorities, and will continue to do so.

"In particular, full co-operation was given to the police and following their investigation they found no evidence of criminality.

"The order is also co-operating fully with the ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. It would be inappropriate to make any further comment."

PAT SAYS:

Another horror story of the Catholic Church's abuse of innocent little children.

400 children buried in an unmarked grave and one child murdered by a nun and all of them buried with less dignity than a family pet!

This reminds us that these are NOT one off cases but rather a sign of abuse and cruelty that was ENDEMIC and SYSTEMATIC in Catholicism.

Not many years ago I went to say Mass at the grave of a young boy who had been murdered by a Christian Brother in Tralee in Kerry.

The local Catholic doctor provided the Christian Brothers at the time with a death certificate saying the 14-year-old died of "DEMENTIA"!

You can talk about "all the good" done by some people in the Catholic Church until the cows come home.

But there is no getting away from the fact that this is an EVIL INSTITUTION that has perpetrated serious crimes against humanity.

Jesus himself said that a good tree cannot produce bad fruit.

Quite simply we are dealing with the same forest that produced trees like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin - the forest of EVIL!