FLYPAPER

The strategy came out of the closet last night. My take opposite.

MAGDALENE, AGAIN: I should add, I suppose, that the Church in which I grew up – mercifully post Vatican II – never demonstrated cruelty, barbarity or abuse, at least in my experience. Part of my anger – and I’d say that of many fellow Catholics – is due to our own dismay at our naivete and ignorance, helped in part by the deference that was second nature to us. And it’s important to note that the evils that we are now discovering are the sins of men and women, not of the faith itself. Here’s a more critical review of the movie. I disagree with it in some respects – I do think that Geraldine McEwen, for example, showed precisely how a nun came to choose brutality, rather than simply demonstrate it. On another angle, this letter to the Irish Times last Friday shows how this slave labor was also a way to enrich the Church financially:

It is also interesting to consider the unfair trading situation which pertained for most of that time. Ordinary commercial laundries throughout Ireland paid their largely female workforce the going rate of pay, and published annual accounts which were filed in the Companies Office. But they had to compete with Magdalen laundries run on slave labour which, as registered charities, had accounts closed to public inspection. And for those charities that may also have been limited companies, a special section of Irish company law allowed religious orders to file their annual audits at the Companies Office without any disclosure of turnover, profits or capital assets. This special exemption is still in place and used by a number of RC organisations.
Much has been made of the selfless devotion of the individual nuns who worked in these institutions, but even they would surely admit that they did so voluntarily as part of their religious vocation and could have left at any time, unlike the unfortunate women who ended up in their care. It was a sickening final insult that the High Park nuns, having sold the land for a considerable fortune, did not even grant these women individual graves: they were institutionalised even in death.
We can only speculate on what happened to the accumulated profits generated by these businesses, but one can be reasonably certain that the canny and able administrator nuns invested in buildings and land.

Perhaps some of it will now be used to compensate the hundreds and thousands of children abused and destroyed by the church hierarchy for so long.