Magdalene Laundries Documentary

diddley

Harrowing tale from these women, it's on youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_BeKwUb3RF0
Mods if this should be in the Christianity forum please move.

Zombrex

diddley wrote: »

Harrowing tale from these women, it's on youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_BeKwUb3RF0
Mods if this should be in the Christianity forum please move.

that is weird, just mentioned the M.L on the Christianity forum, before seeing this ... spooky ... clearly this means something ... God? God is that you?

Rev Hellfire

Its harrowing stuff all right, saw this before on the telly a while back.
But personally I can't help but feel that Irish society has made the catholic church a scapegoat in this. That's not to abolish blame from the church before anyone assumes that's what I'm doing.
Rather Irish society and the Irish church where so heavily entwined that one really was an extension of the other, and that worked both ways with Irish society influencing the nature of the Irish church.
It wasn't the Catholic Church which placed these women into these institutions, but rather the Irish people. imho etc etc

pH

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

It wasn't the Catholic Church which placed these women into these institutions, but rather the Irish people. imho etc etc

Fine, the state passed legislation allowing women and girls to be legally held, the gardai complied by rounding up and returning escapees, and society and families committed their daughters to them, there is blame all round.

However, if what we read about Christianity is true, these should have been wonderful places, full of care, compassion and kindness. However we find they were not, indeed these committed and devoted Christians in many cases could not treat these unfortunate women as well as the prison system treated murderers and other criminals.

I guess what scares me is that it just seems that when the "religious" get absolute power over others it invariably ends up in an ugly abusive system, be it Taliban controlled Afghanistan or a convent in rural Ireland. I know there are good experiments showing how easy this happens (Stanford Prison Experiment) to anyone, but the fact that their deeply held Christian beliefs and teachings seem not to counteract this tendency even in the slightest, gives me serious doubt as to their real motives and any claims that religion actually does any good anywhere.

Dades

pH wrote: »

However, if what we read about Christianity is true, these should have been wonderful places, full of care, compassion and kindness. However we find they were not, indeed these committed and devoted Christians in many cases could not treat these unfortunate women as well as the prison system treated murderers and other criminals.

It's still the people who send their kids away out of pure cowardice for what other people think.

My wife's cousin was sent by her parents to a convent to have a baby in the 80's, and was made give it up by her parents. Every time I meet her (now elderly) parents I have to bite my tongue.

robindch

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

Rather Irish society and the Irish church where so heavily entwined that one really was an extension of the other, and that worked both ways with Irish society influencing the nature of the Irish church. It wasn't the Catholic Church which placed these women into these institutions, but rather the Irish people. imho etc etc

Yes, that's right and I believe it was this understanding which informed the residential institution redress board deal between the state and the church (which Bertie rushed through cabinet on the last day of the Dail-before-last) The church, which ran these appalling places, should not have behaved as it did, and the state should not have let them. One can argue the toss about whether it should have been a 50-50 split, but at this distance in time and space, I think an assumption of equal blame seems as reasonable as any.

Having said that, one is free to draw one's own conclusions from the church's behavior since the deal was made -- it employed some of the country's most expensive lawyers who successfully repudiated the 50-50 agreement. It's now in for around 10% of the bill, with the taxpayer picking up the tab for the remaining EUR1.2 billion or so. And of that 10%, the church has been strikingly reluctant to hand over anything.

robindch

Dades wrote: »

It's still the people who send their kids away out of pure cowardice for what other people think. My wife's cousin was sent by her parents to a convent to have a baby in the 80's, and was made give it up by her parents

I'm not sure that it's all that wise to call it cowardice -- this no doubt happened in the days of rabid pulpit denunciations, priests and nuns stalking dances, terminal social and economic boycotts and a thousand other cheap miseries.

In Joyce's useful phrase, Christ and Caesar were fist and glove and you'd need uncommon reserves of bravery to go up against either.

btw, a similar thing happened in my family back in the 1960's in Kerry -- a relative became pregnant by an American guy and she was forced by her parents to give up the baby for adoption. She subsequently married the same guy, but never found out what happened to the first baby who was sent, I believe through the Church, to the USA. As the years dragged by, the American turned out to be a major-league asshole, she hit the bottle, one kid committed suicide, she divorced, returned home, dried out and yer man became a household name as a management guru who wrote a popular book about how to be a good parent.