Children's Cemetery

I want to share with you tonight a sight from our Connemara tour last Saturday. It was a children's cemetery. The bus did not stop for us to take a picture. I checked the Internet and found no photographs there. I wrote the tour company and came up empty with them as well. "It is a sad place," the owner wrote back. "No one generally wants a photograph of it."

So here it is. You drive up the side of one of the rocky Connemara mountains built on the ancient granite with a layer of peat blanketing the landscape. The road is barely wide enough for the bus; if we meet a car going the opposite direction, somewhat is going to have to back a long way to find a wide spot. Two thirds up the mountain, twenty feet to the left of the road and a bit higher you see a fenced area, roughly square with grass a little taller than the rest of the countryside because the sheep don't keep it trimmed. In most Irish cemetaries the ground is covered with gravestones. But the children's cemetery has only a single Celtic Cross standing watch over one corner, keeping its faitherful vigil over this holy ground.

But that, of course, is the debate. Because these are the bodies of the unbaptized children who died during the potato famine in 1847 and were refused burial in the holy ground of a church cemetery.

And here is my question: to whom do I ask forgiveness?