The Magdalene laundries
A scene from the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters
The current furore about child abuse in Catholic institutes reminded me of a piece I had read about the far worse abuse of young women in – where else? – Ireland.
I say ‘far worse’ because in the case of paedophilia, the Catholic Church was clearly not directly responsible for abusing the children but only of failing to put in place a safety net that would keep out determined paedophiles making their way through the priesthood and towards their victims.
But with the Magdalene laundries, where ‘fallen’ women were incarcerated for a lifetime of slavery, the Catholic Church in Ireland was 100% responsible. Yet this dreadful historic account of extreme misogyny in our own time remains generally untold.
I’ve found the piece. It was broadcast originally on CBS ’60 Minutes’ in 1999 and uploaded on the CBS News website four years later.
CBS News Aug. 3, 2003
The Magdalene Laundry – A Life of Servitude Behind Convent Walls
By Violet Feng
Someone once said the only thing really new in the world is the history we don’t know. The Irish people are learning that right now and it’s a painful experience.
It began five years ago when an order of nuns in Dublin sold off part of its convent to real estate developers. On that property were the remains of 133 women buried in unmarked graves, and buried with them was a scandal.
As it turns out, the women had been virtual prisoners, confined by the Catholic Church behind convent walls for perceived sins of the flesh, and sentenced to a life of servitude in something called the Magdalene laundries.
It sounds medieval, something that happened hundreds of years ago, but, in fact, the last Magdalene laundry closed just over two years ago. And as the story was firstly reported in 1999, revelations have shocked the Irish people, embarrassed the Catholic Church and tarnished the country’s image.
From the front, the former Good Shepherd Convent in Cork looks like an exclusive private school, with a hidden history too heavy to tell. At the back of the convent, you can still see the skeleton of the washhouse, one of dozens of Magdalene institutions scattered across the countryside.
It was there that Mary Norris and Josephine McCarthy each spent three years of hard labor, enforced silence and prayer, after it was decided that they were in moral danger and unfit to live in Irish society.
Both had come from troubled homes, spent time in Catholic orphanages, and were sent out as servant girls, where they ran into trouble with their employers for staying out late. They were turned over to the nuns because it was suspected they either were, or were about to become, sexually active. Josephine says she was accused of having sex in the backseat of a car.
“And then the next thing I knew, I was with this woman on a train to Cork. And I was just brought up here. I was just told my name was Phyllis, and I’d work in the laundry,” said McCarthy, walking down the laundry during her revisit to the convent.
They were given new names by the nuns to help them break from their pasts. No one knows how many women were sent off to the laundries. The religious orders refuse to make those records available, but estimates range into the tens of thousands.
The church was the only authority under which they were held, as Norris explained. “I would have rather been down in the women’s jail. At least I would have got a sentence and I would know when I was leaving,” she said.
“It’s made me feel a horrible, dirty person all my life,” McCarthy added, when the two of them walked past the convent.
They were both teenagers when they came here, Norris in the 1950s and McCarthy in the 1960s. Their only crime was appearing to violate the moral code dictated by the church. At that time, it was the church and not the state that was the most powerful force in Ireland. There was no due process and no appeal.
According to McCarthy, the women got up about 5 in the morning, went to Mass, had breakfast, started work and then went to bed about 7 at night.
“That was it. That was our life. And we dare not ask questions,” she said. “And (the work is) very hard. You’d have to hand-wash – scrub. You’d have no knuckles left. Ironing – you would be burnt. It was just hard work.”
The choice of work was no accident. They were called “Magdalenes”, or “penitents”. By scrubbing, they were supposed to wash away their sins along with the stains on the laundry of the orphanages, churches, prisons and even the local butcher shop.
The income from their labor put a roof over their heads, food on their plates, and financed any other ventures the nuns might be involved in.
Besides washing all day, every “Magdalene” needed to pray out loud for her sins.
The laundries got their name from Mary Magdalene, the fallen woman who became one of Jesus’ closest followers. They began 150 years ago as homes to rehabilitate prostitutes. But by the early 20th century, the role had been expanded to care for unwed mothers and other young women the church considered to be wayward.
The stigma attached to illegitimacy and promiscuity was so severe that the woman was often thrown out of her home, driven from her community, disowned by her family. And for many, the laundries were the only things that stood between them and the street. Although few visual records could be found, some of the massive compounds are still standing.
One of the former Magdalene institutions in Waterford is now a college campus. Niall McElwee, a sociologist who teaches here, has written about the Magdalens.
He said girls could be sent to the institution by different people – parish priests, Catholic curates, family members and sometimes even the girls themselves.
Although some people knew the laundries existed, according to McElwee, what went on behind the convent walls was largely a mystery. It was a place to be feared.
“There would have been apple trees, for example. And this would be one place where children would not steal apples, mainly because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they got caught inside,” he explained.
“Some people are arguing that these were prisons. At least in a prison, people had certain rights and responsibilities that were certainly taken away from the women within these walls.”
Quoting from one of the religious people, McElwee said in those days, “every effort was made to try and locate these girls.” Therefore, even if the confined girls wanted to escape, it would have been very difficult. At the Magdalene institution in Cork, Norris and McCarthy were locked behind 20-foot brick walls, topped with shards of broken glass that were mortared into the concrete.
The only way out was to be claimed by a relative who was willing to take responsibility. McCarthy recalled that they were watched 24 hours a day. And the chances of being claimed was slim, too.
“My mother didn’t know where I was. My sisters didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew where I was,” said Norris.
In some cases, inquiring family members were told that the church had found their missing relatives in other cities, and with new names, they could be difficult to locate.
Norris was finally released when an aunt in Boston began making inquiries. McCarthy was rescued by a brother in London.
She said, “When I left, they gave my brother an envelope with three 10-shilling notes in it. And my brother asked the nun what it was for, and she said, ‘That’s the payment for working.’ And my brother wasn’t very nice. And he just tore it up and threw it back at her.”
At that time, 30 shillings was about $3.20.
According to McCarthy and Norris, the experience was hardest on unmarried mothers. Their children were taken from them at birth and placed in orphanages, sometimes within the same compound. Both of them remembered a woman who could see and hear her child. “She couldn’t even talk to her; she couldn’t smile at her. And that was her daughter, her baby daughter in the orphanage,” McCarthy recalled.
Most of the babies were eventually adopted, some by good Catholic families in the United States.
Vincent Browne, founder of Magill magazine, is one of Ireland’s most respected editors and journalists. He believes what happened to those “Magdalenes” have a lot to do with people’s attitudes on sex and women.
“That part of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin has been to accord a status to virginity,” he said. “To some extent, women who had had sex, within or without marriage, were regarded as unclean and – and as less than perfect.”
Browne said the nuns believed that through suffering and hard work in the laundries for the greater glory of God, they might find salvation in heaven.
“And I suppose a lot of conscientious Catholics were going to be preserved for the hereafter, even though their lives on Earth was going to be harsh and difficult,” he added.
When the last laundries finally closed, most of the Magdalenes had nowhere to go. Many of them now reside in group homes and convents around the country. For example, a convent in Dublin still holds some women now being cared for by the same nuns who once confined them.
The association that represents the nuns, or the Conference of Religious of Ireland, declined an interview. It, however, provided CBS with a statement saying that the Sisters accept the part they played in this regrettable era and asked that it be examined in context. The statement also admits that many former Magdalenes had painful memories and welcomed the opportunity for them to speak with us.
But when the CBS reporter knocked on the door, he was told, “There’s no one to speak.”
“I think the attitude at the moment is to batten down the hatches and hope to God that the scandals over-blow and that the media take up some other cause,” said McElwee.
The story of the Magdalene laundries is but the latest blow to the prestige and power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, which no longer dominates the political agenda. The church, perhaps afraid of litigation and a movement to win some sort of compensation for the women, has remained silent.
The only church official who was willing to discuss the laundries was Willie Walsh, Bishop of Killaloe.
He said, “I think we ought never to be afraid of truth. I think truth is a fundamental Gospel value.” He agreed that in some ways, the values of Gospel could not be reconciled with the treatment that some of these Magdalen women received.
For now, the women must be content with small victories. Norris petitioned the sisters of the Good Shepherd in Cork to at least list the names of the Magdalenes who had been buried in unmarked graves behind the laundry. The nuns complied.
“I, who lived in that society, have a deep sense of shame at the wrong that has been done to them,” said Bishop Walsh. “I would see an obligation in us to make some effort to make our reparation for the wrongs that were done to these girls. It’s not just a matter for the nuns, or for the religious orders. I think it’s a matter for all of us in society.”
38 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
This kind of shameful stuff (and worse) has been documented for centuries. When I was a teenager, growing up in Canada, I read a book entitled ‘Maria Monk’–shocking! Google ‘The awful disclosures of Maria Monk’ if interested. One quote: “Maria Monk describes the convent (located in Montreal) as little more than a harem for the use of the local priesthood”.
I did Google ‘The awful disclosures of Maria Monk’ and here is an extract from Wikipedia:
“The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If the sexual union produced a baby, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Uncooperative nuns disappeared.
Historians are unanimous in their agreement that the whole account was false.
Monk’s errors began early in her story. In her account, she stated that there were three convents in Montreal: “1st. The Congregational Nunnery. 2d. The Black Nunnery, or Convent of Sister Bourgeoise. 3d The Grey Nunnery.”[1] She was, however, confused even on the nature of the orders. The Congregational Nuns were the Congregation of Notre Dame, founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys, not the Sisters of Charity, as Monk stated at the beginning of her text;[2] the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, whose habits were black but who were not typically called “Black Nuns”, operated the Hotel-Dieu, where Monk claimed that she entered and suffered, and it was not founded by “Sister Bourgeoise[sic]”; and it was the Sisters of Charity who were commonly known as the Grey Nuns.
There is some evidence that Maria Monk had suffered a brain injury as a child.[3][4] One possible result of this injury was that Monk was easily manipulated, and was not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy.
It has been suggested that Maria Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers.[4]”
Besides the obvious horror of it all, the next thing that sprung to my mind while reading this article was ‘kemm ahna imsieken u bla sense’.
I deduce from the time-line indicated that the last Magdalene laundry closed in 2001.
That’s a full 6 years AFTER Ireland introduced divorce legislation.
We don’t, and probably won’t have divorce for quite a long while.
Although one thing is of course not a consequence of the other, and while I do not believe we have such extreme situations as the Magdalene laundries in Malta, why in heavens name do we still not have divorce ?
It puts the sentence “At that time, it was the church and not the state that was the most powerful force in Ireland” in a right pathetic and nonsensical context about Malta in 2010.
An equally horrific story from Ireland is told in the film “Song for a raggy boy” (2003). Worth seeing, though some scenes can be quite unnerving.
excuse me. but i disagree with you. not having a ‘safety net’ due to convenient ignorance or alleged ignorance was bad enough, but covering up once they were caught strongly implies that the church condones their action. Seems you are condoning it too. Shame on you Daphne. never expected it from you
[Daphne – Oh bugger off, honestly. Condoning it, just because I don’t subscribe to the universal propaganda that the Catholic Church ‘covered it up’. For goodness sake, we’re talking about children who grew up to be adults. If they wanted to report the abuse to the police, they were free to do so. If they didn’t, it was because they didn’t want to for reasons best known to themselves and which are their business not ours. Look what happened when seven men in Malta decided to report four priests to the police: three of the priests are being prosecuted and another has absconded. How can the police act without the consent of the victim? It’s impossible, because they need the victim’s cooperation and testimony.]
PParnis, the shame is always on the wrong doer, never on the writer. When someone is murdered, you have the murderer, the guy who says miskin and the one who says haqqu. Which one goes on trial?
@PParnis
If it wasn’t for some journalists who ‘don’t go with the flow’, we the common people would be oblivious as to what is going on around us.
Take Daphne’s description of the behaviour of Consuelo Scerri Herrera. It would not have been brought to light otherwise.
Please Mr. Parnis let’s call a spade, a spade for once…
So many untold stories. In Malta child abuse did not happen only at St Joseph’s Institute and not only by priests. I have heard many stories.
These men took action because they were in a group supporting each other. I cannot see how a six-year-old can report anything to the police when at that age he or she cannot understand what is happening to him or her, maybe even accepting sexual abuse a something normal. Not even to your parents. At that age you cannot explain to your parents these things.
I cannot imagine when he or she comes of age and therefore becomes conscious of what was going on, whether it happened directly to him or her or just witnessed, reporting these abuses to the police forty, fifty or a hundred years ago when sexual abuse was not in the open as it is nowadays.
The church covered up many grave sins for a very long time. I subscribe to this truth that the church and also the present pope covered grave sins for a long time and most probably still is.
Find a stick and beat the church on the head, as much as you can.
Daphne, please reconsider such glib and hurtful statements that “If they didn’t, it was because they didn’t want to for reasons best known to themselves and which are their business not ours.”
[Daphne – How is that sentence either glib or hurtful? What it says is that it is nobody’s business but theirs why they didn’t wish to take the matter to court, because they are best placed to understand their situation and the rest of us are not.]
You do not know what they went through and what they are feeling. Neither do I but I have professionally treated many people who reveal abuse when they are much older and believe me they cry and feel the pain as it it had happened yesterday.
Children who have been abused (sexual, physical or emotional) will often suppress painful humiliating and paralysing memories for years before they can handle a disclosure let alone an open discussion.
It is worse when the abuser is in a position of power such as a priest or the head of the family. Sometimes there is pressure from the family not to cause “trouble”. Such recalled memories often re-traumatise the victim and is akin to post-traumatic stress disorder in the way ‘flashback’ memories are experienced.
This is why such victims need protection against aggressive questioning in court and why specially trained police have to interview them and why many countries have abolished the statue of limitations for such crimes.
[Daphne – I agree with you about the aggressive questioning in court. It is exactly what I have said: that the ‘closed doors’ in this case protect the defence lawyers as much as their clients. Dr Caruana Curran and Dr Mallia feel safe in being as savage, unpleasant and unkind as they please, because there is nobody there to witness their behaviour except the parties to the case, and there can be no reporting of what occurs.]
”The religious orders refuse to make those records available, but estimates range into the tens of thousands.”
Why hasn’t the Irish Court subpoenaed these internal records from the uncooperative religious orders involved? That’s what I would ask.
“I would see an obligation in us to make some effort to make our reparation for the wrongs that were done to these girls. It’s not just a matter for the nuns, or for the religious orders.”
“some effort” is not good enough for the victims, and to the man in the street. We have have placed our trust in institutions be they religious or otherwise, knowing that less fortunate individuals may seek refuge and respite in institutes such as the above, so one day these poor souls may re-establish themselves into society. NO! A half hearted apology will not do!
Just for the record, I count myself fortunate that I was educated (and I heartfully thank my dear parents for their sacrifice) in two Catholic schools, being St. Joseph and De La Salle College.
It is a pity that in the early 80’s, the Labour Government screwed up big time to ruin the way the private schools where governed.
Although one may say that it is history past, the damage has been done, and I believe that it still shows.
@ Brian,
and weren’t you ever caned at De La Salle? Wasn’t that another kind of child abuse?
@ A Camilleri,
Yes, on very rare occasions I was disciplined. I bear no grudge however, as my misdemeanours then, had warranted ‘six of the best’. And that I acknowledge even today.
No, it was not child abuse. We were not hanged, drawn and quartered if that is what you wanted to hear, Mr. Camilleri.
I still do not regard it as a tantamount to violence and abuse. The caning if one could call it so, was more of a ceremony (albeit an embarrassing one for the receiver) than a show of force. No excessive or brute force was inflicted upon the pupil.
The 2002 movie “The Magdalene Sisters” documents this true life story and makes for very uncomfortable viewing.
Also your statement that “in the case of paedophilia, the Catholic Church was clearly not directly responsible for abusing the children but ONLY of failing to put in place a safety net that would keep out determined paedophiles making their way through the priesthood and towards their victims” understates the documented responsibility of the RC Church in this matter.
The scandal is not that there were paedophiles in the priesthood but that these men were deliberately moved from parish to parish by the church hierarchy after they had abused children and essentially given free rein to prey on their next set of victims.
The even bigger scandal appears to be the extraordinary efforts made by the hierarchy at the highest levels to “hush matters up” and to deal with what in effect amounts to serious criminal acts as an “internal matter of church discipline”.
And the cherry on the cake has to be Pope John Paul II’s decision to first refuse to accept Bernard Cardinal Law’s resignation when he admitted to moving a convicted paedophile priest from parish to parish and then agreeing to accept his resignation and then appointing Law to the position of Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore which is part of Vatican City State and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of any prosecuting authorities.
And this is before we even begin to get to the most recent statement by the former Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Munich who is now reported to be complaining that he was strong armed by the Vatican into taking the rap for Cardinal Ratzinger when he stated a few weeks ago that he alone was responsible for moving a convicted paedophile priest to another parish and that Ratzinger knew nothing about it even although he was Archbishop at the time.
No, the Roman Catholic Church’s responsibility is much more involved and much more serious than your statement leads one to believe – and the final chapter in the story hasn’t even been written yet.
[Daphne – I’m sorry, but I can’t subscribe to the theory of the Catholic Church as a paedophile network. It should occur to you that these things were unspoken in the Catholic Church for the very same contextual reasons that the children allowed it to happen, felt they couldn’t tell their parents (many of them lived with their parents and were abused in sacristies, on outings, or at school), the parents would never have believed it, and if they did, their initial reaction would be to hush it up. That wouldn’t happen today. Ask yourself what has changed – not the nature of paedophilia, but certainly the social context. A priest has no chance of abusing a boy in a school context today: the boy would immediately resist, fight back, yell, tell his parents and then there’d be hell to pay. Why?]
I never thought or stated that the Catholic Church was a paedophile network. Essentially, until about 2003 the Catholic Church hierarchy was trying to “avoid scandal” by keeping things under wraps not because it was seeking to aid and abet the paedophiles but because it put its own reputation in the eyes of the faithful way above the welfare of the children that were at risk of abuse. In other words it had its priorities all screwed up. The social context has a lot to do with it as you say.
[Daphne – That’s why I drew a comparison with the behaviour of parents: they too put personal reputation above the welfare of children, their own and others.]
Certainly. Parents were conditioned by society to see priests and religious as being above reproach and in addition one had to save face. Children knew better than to try and challenge the prevailing view. Nor was abuse in Malta just limited to the truly powerless and forgotten – the orphans at St. Joseph’s home. “Brian” can be thankful that he was not abused at St. Joseph’s or De La Salle. Others were not so lucky.
[Daphne – Yes, I know. That’s why I remarked that there was an equally great failure in the nature of parent-child relationships. I ask men my age and older why they didn’t immediately tell their parents about inappropriate advances and the reaction I get is one of shocked disbelief ‘As if! What? Tell my parents? Come on.’]
Granted, parent-child relationships probably contributed to the cover-ups, within an overbearing social context that valued keeping face over seeking justice and put religion above all else, whatever the cost.
I’m not sure it’s right, however, to compare the behaviour of those parents with that of Catholic Church leaders accused of cover-ups. Even if the contextual reasons were similar, the Church leaders’ actions related to members of their own ‘family’, answerable directly to them. Their responsibility was greater; as the first line of defense – and as the only ones who knew – the onus was on them to act and act decisively. Instead, they exploited that social context to keep everything hidden.
I’m not convinced abuse like this couldn’t happen today, either, although I’d agree the likelihood is much smaller. To say it wouldn’t happen today would be to assume good parenting and upbringing all around, which simply isn’t the case (not to mention that this is a multi-national issue, potentially involving some countries where society’s relationship with the Church is still similar to what it was in more developed countries when the abuse took place).
Even today, child exploitation is a major, sensitive issue because of the very nature of younger minds, their relationship with authority and their reaction to threats, shame and coercion. Whatever their upbringing, the threat of abuse and exploitation remains, which is why those parents and society as a whole can only carry part of the blame for what happened. Church leaders involved in cover-ups, on the other hand, as respected adults with direct responsibility for the actions of the accused and the tools to do something about it at their disposal, should surely carry most of it.
No doubt, history is always a good teacher. That is why, I suppose, we need to remind ourselves, from time to time, of all those events, whether personal or social, that formed our individual or cultural identities.
If we are to live integrated lives we must also face those historical events that traumatised us. Metaphorically speaking the demons that assailed us in the morning of our lives and were buried, return to haunt us at noon.
Generally speaking, maybe, that is one reason, among several, why reports of such traumas and, even crimes, are reported later in life rather earlier.
What worries me greatly, however, is that while we look at these traumatic events from our past, we cannot look at them dispassionately. And here lies the danger. Thus, while the story of the Magdalene laundries must be told at all costs because it is the sad story of so many women who lived miserable abused lives yet, we must be careful not to judge what happened then by the our standards today. Or should we?
I think it is safe to assume that societies in general, whether in Catholic Ireland or anywhere else in the patriarchal world, for that matter, were pretty brutal especially towards children and women.
Only yesterday, it was reported that a cleric in Iran blamed quakes on promiscuous women.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8631775.stm
Not according to Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi
http://newsarse.com/2010/04/21/our-women-should-act-like-earthquake-free-ibizans-says-iranian-cleric/
Surely this Hojatoleslam guy will urgently receive a fatwa like Salman Rushdie of the Satanic Verses’ fame.
Surely, he won’t. That site is a piss-take. A successor to the defunct “The Brains Trust”.
Ibeefa….
“Did you know that Tehran doesn’t have a single nightclub to rival those on Ibiza? It is actions like this that are making God very angry indeed.”
He could be right.
It’s not always their personal reputation that parents are thinking of. One has to consider also the effects (on the child) of court proceedings here in Malta which are never-ending and a farce.
Daphne: While you make a valid point about the moral Zeitgeist at the time these abuses took place it is only valid to a degree.
When the Roman Catholic Church has indoctrinated children, and adults from early on about heaven, hell, their immortal soul, and the threat of, horror upon horrors, of EXCOMMUNICATION if the subject of abuse was brought up there is little surprise the victims grinned and bore it. They were up against the world! Not everyone has your strength to deal with adversity.
Even if the parents would have gone to the police, and believed (unlikely) the ostracizing in the local community would have been quite unbearable. That the Church condoned such behaviour whilst STILL claiming the moral high ground should be inexcusable, even to the most die hard Catholic. Taking such a position is being an apologist for the Roman Catholic Church, rather than as in every other case, “you do the crime; you do the time”.
The Roman Catholic Church was and has been given a free pass to continue sinning away without consequences. Admitting this complicity would go a long way to heal the pain still suffered by victims to this day.
@Anthony V. Falzon
“The scandal is not that there were paedophiles in the priesthood but that these men were deliberately moved from parish to parish by the church hierarchy after they had abused children and essentially given free rein to prey on their next set of victims”
Obviously, in affirming the above, you are loading your words very heavily with all the hindsight knowledge and wisdom which the Church of forty or fifty years ago just did not have at its disposal.
While there is no reason to doubt that the bishops were indeed trying to avoid scandal and to protect the institution from harm, they certainly did not have the basic information that paedophilia, for instance, is an incurable condition.
Thus it seems to me quite unreasonable to state that the Catholic Church deliberately moved these individuals around from parish to parish to prey on the innocent. Furthermore, as Daphne claims the culture of taboos and secrecy permeated all institutions including the family.
The rape and other sexual abuse of the 11 former orphans at St. Joseph’s who have come forward so far to tell their horror stories occurred in the 1980s and 1990s and not 50 years ago.
Have a look at the article “Revising History Vatican Style” which appears in today’s online version of the National Catholic Reporter for a sobering analysis of how the Vatican is trying to rewrite history even today. The article is written by Tom Doyle – a priest, canon lawyer, addictions therapist and someone who describes himself as a long-time supporter of justice and compassion for clergy sex abuse victims.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/examining-crisis/revising-history-vatican-style
Nikita Alamango, in her painful effort to find a word that rhymes with ‘secularisation’ in her blog on timesofmalta.com, has coined a new one: ‘resacrilisation’.
There’s another one, too: ‘conservativeness’ used instead of ‘conservatism’.
As for the concluding questions to her profound article, can anyone find me an elf to help me understand?
It is just this kind of drivel that’s contributing to the declining standard of timesofmalta.com.
tell me Daphne, instead of lambasting the errant priests, how come you are using double standards? Why aren’t you lambasting that pig who raped his own three children? WHy are you not demaining this pig and centering only the Catholic Church? Are the Protestant churches free from secual abuses against each other? And what about abuses commited by bastard husbands against their wives and childred? Only the catholic priests are in your firing line? Have you ever been abused by the Sisters when you were at Sacred Heart? So why put them all in one big basket….because they are catholics?
[Daphne – Here’s somebody who can’t read.]
And you can’t think logically.
@Anthony V. Falzon
Anthony surely you have not replaced Roma Locuta Est by the National Catholic Reporter, for crying out loud.
Just a glance through that paper is enough to assure you that it is not at all friendly to anything Catholic or Roman, for that matter. In fact, it is often inimical to Catholic teaching.
I, for one, remain unimpressed by their statements. One of these, by the way, is that Malta consists of an archipelago of SIX islands in the Mediterranean. Am I missing an island or two here?
Are the contributors to the National Catholic Reporter not priests and religious for the most part? If they occasionally launch a salvo at the boys in Rome isn’t it because the boys in Rome have done something worth showing up? As for the Maltese Islands consisting of six islands maybe they were counting Kemmunet, Filfla and the Fungus Rock.
At least 7 islands, last time I counted: Malta, Gozo, Comino, Cominotto, Manoel, St Paul’s and Filfla. Fungus Rock is a little too small I think to be considered as anything but a fragment.
Actually there are more: Malta, Gozo, Comino, Cominotto, Filfla, St. Paul’s island, Manuel island. Those are seven, then there is the Fungus Rock and that low lying island across Maghtab I do not know if it has a name.
For those interested in reading more about the ongoing campaign to bring justice to survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, please visit JFM’s website at http://www.magdalenelaundries.com
The Magdalenes were excluded from the state’s Residential Institutions Redress Board. No one in Ireland–not church, not state, not families, and not society–has apologized to the victims and survivors of these institutions.
Daphne …of course the Church is deeply involved in a cover up ! There were many cases when the Curia got wind of what was happening. Did the Church defrock them let alone report them to the police? In most cases they were transferred to another parish in another country . Now if that is not a cover up , what is ? U Ejja Daphne !
Some of the victims tell you that in their situation they were so innocent that they did not even realise there was something wrong going on (in the sexual act itself) .These were orphans with no parents to cry to and speak to. They were in a total state of confusion , scarred for the rest of their lives . And you expect them to report to the police. Daphne , picture the situation 20 years ago – a victim decides to report to the police. The police would run a mockery of the victim making such accusations . Probably the victim would end up at Mount Carmel . For goodness sake ! Even now, I lodge a police report for someone scatching my car , and the line of questioning I get is as though I am lodging a false report .
Its all coming out now , because the media uncovered it all , and the victims know that possibly their version of events is credible.
[Daphne – David, the point at issue remains that without the consent of the victim nothing can be done to prosecute the perpetrator. This is not a matter of a cover-up or not a cover-up. The situation you describe applied historically not just to the sexual abuse of children but to the abuse of women and all sorts of other situations which horrify us today but which were looked at differently then. To mention just one case from recent memory: that man who shot and killed his father in Gozo a few years ago. Do you remember how the evidence during the trial shocked us all, shocked even the jurors who ended up finding him not guilty of murder because the thought of sending him to jail was just too much to contemplate? The whole village knew what was going on in that household. So did the police. The man abused his wife and sons mercilessly, keeping them working as unpaid slaves as adults, threatening them with a gun as children, beating them all, taking other women home for sex. Did anyone do anything? No. The victims, all adults, were paralysed into action until one of them snapped and shot, and nobody came in from the outside to interfere when they were children because in those days, nobody did – not just the church but also the state. You might as well accuse the whole of society of being involved in a cover-up, which it pretty much was. Think of all the girls and women – some from families that would surprise you, in fact the more ‘important’ the family, the more likely it was to happen – dispatched to England to have their ‘illegitimate’ babies there and return without them after the pregnancy was concealed. Was the church involved in that? No. It was the social hypocrisy of the times. There is still a huge amount of social hypocrisy, only part of which has to do with Catholicism and the rest has to do with maintaining one’s reputation in a small society. Of course children can’t report to anyone other than their parents – that’s precisely why all these victims the world over are reporting now, as adults. Even as a parent, it’s a very difficult decision to make: do you report the perpetrator and expose your child – at a very tender age – to the kind of savage grilling these men are getting now (and they’re men) from Giannella Caruana Curran and Manwel Mallia (no holds barred, imagine a child going through that) or do you let your child recover in peace and not prolong the agony? Rather than a cover-up, what we are looking at here is a conspiracy of silence which takes in society as a whole. The behaviour of the Catholic Church in these issues only reflected the attitudes of the society and times in which it operated, and make no mistake about that. Some time ago a woman we probably both know or know of killed herself after a lifetime of depression, the result of her father abusing sexually when she was a child, and what she thought was her mother’s collusion in it, or rather than collusion, refusal to see. How is the Catholic Church involved in that cover-up? This is the way people were, and many of them are still like that. I’m a realist about these things.]
Daphne every citizen has a right to a defence, be it from Giannella or from Paul or from X. So what’s cooking here? Do we tell the court to remove their lawyers as well? Remember that they have as yet not been condemned by the courts and until such time, they are innocent until proved guilty. And besides it’s only the alleged victims’ stories that we have heard and to date these stories have even been compounded to rapes and what not. No one has heard the truth behind these alleged stories. So let’s stop at that shall we.
[Daphne – The priests made statements to the police, under interrogation, in which they admitted their crimes, the difference being that they did not call them crimes but mistakes. Nobody is questioning their right to a lawyer, of course not. We are discussing something quite different: the behaviour of those lawyers behind closed doors, safe in the knowledge that they will not be exposed to public opprobrium.]
The fact that the Church did not even defrock them , but generally sent them to another parish (to abuse fresh meat) , in my books, is not only a cover up, but complicity in the crime. A “conspiracy of slience”, as you term it, would be to defrock them, and it ends there.
An exact parallel is when a banker is found out to have committed fraud, and the bank dismisses him without reporting him to the police, so the bank does not tarnish its reputation. THAT is a conspiracy of silence. A cover up would be to send the person to work in a different branch – which surely the bank would never do. And that’s exactly what the Church has been doing for a far more serious crime.
Concerning the defence council like Giannella Caruana Curran and Manwel Mallia – it’s a common and normal occurrence for a lawyer to decline a case because because the other party is a friend of theirs.
[Daphne – Or for any other reason: it’s a free country and no lawyer is obliged to take up a brief unless ordered to do so expressly by the court in cases where the accused turns up without a lawyer.]
And yet Malta’s top lawyers find no difficulty in accepting such heinous cases. I would certainly have difficulty in defending such cases, in as much as I would never, ever be able to defend Mr Fritzel in Austria!
The evidence of bad apples at the highest levels in the Roman Curia is well documented in this informative article appearing in the National Catholic Reporter.
http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/vatican-cardinal-bucked-us-bishop-abuse
A fantastic web page , it has long sought a paper com this