Despanan |
10-07-2012 06:51 PM |
Magdelin Laundry
I just saw a play about this last night.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum
So, apparently, up until friggin' 1996 the Catholic Church in Ireland was keeping "fallen" women against their will, in virtual slavery, taking their children away from them to raise in their orphanages, and using them for free labor in their for-profit laundry business. They beat them, they tortured them, they robbed them of all their possessions and gave them new names.
News article on them from 2009:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-567365.html
Quote:
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...
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Here's the website of a group which is trying to get justice for the women, as of now neither the Catholic Church nor the Irish government has so much as apologized for keeping these women in SLAVERY.
The church won't even release the records of who was in the various Laundries or who died there.
Apparently there was a movie about it in 2002:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318411/
So yeah...that happened
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