Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. This episode, I speak with Kalyn Hogan, a journalist and author of the

excellent book, Republic of Shame, Stories from Ireland's Institutions for Fallen Women.

It was probably inevitable after moving to Ireland that I was going to have to confront,

and I suppose do an episode about the power and atrocities of the Catholic Church.

And it's not because I have something personal against the Catholic Church.

Actually, weirdly far from it, I suppose.

I was raised without religion.

I'm not an atheist, however, and I always appreciated the beauty, the aesthetics, the music,

all that kind of stuff of the Catholic Church, and the way that a lot of people around me growing up had this heartfelt connection to it.

I also saw people who had felt very violated by their Catholic upbringing, whether it was because they had some sort of actual abuse going on, or because they felt a violation of their belief system and their

freedom to explore whatever they wanted. I talked about this a bit on the episode I did with

Irish drag queen Panty Bliss and also all those kinds of abuse. But I didn't really dig into the countrywide atrocities of the Catholic Church.

And I also didn't really know where to start. I mean, there are a lot of places that one could

start, but I wanted something that was really focused and very viscerally connected to people

who weren't in Ireland so they could understand it.

Kaelin has written this stunning and profound book about mother and baby homes in Ireland.

It's a very moving book, and it's intense.

Mother, baby homes, in case you don't't know were homes run by nuns in which women who were

pregnant out of marriage were basically imprisoned and had their children taken away from them

often the children died of malnourishment or illness or mistreatment. And subsequently, and especially in recent years,

...