Magdalen Sisters/laundries, film review and link to what happened

It almost sounds as if these women and children were in Nazi Concentration Camps, except there were no armies sent to liberate them! They were imprisoned by their own religious leaders.

I do believe they will be punished for their cruelty, if not in this life, then in the hereafter. One of those abusive priests from Boston was killed in prison this weekend...now his REAL punishment begins, eternal damnation in hell.

I find it unreal that CNN tells us all the atrocities that the Fundamental Taliban have done, and yet, they do not report attrocities that so-called Fundamentalists in other religions have done. Not everyone who cries "Lord, Lord" are godly.

Agreed. But, when most of your viewership is of the religious majority ( Christianity) you don't bad mouth the beliefs of your majority. Sad but true.

Truth in the news as long as it doesn't offend the hand that feeds you....

I totally agree with you barddas.

We need a revolution in the media---unbiased, fair and balanced, and unconnected to special interest or political parties reporting. WHAT?! I know it's crazy, but I can still dream

Anyone who professes to be a Christian and holds his or her tongue or chooses to have a blind-eye to the suffering of the ones they are charged to protect..."The least of these.". then they are seriously warped and deluded. Sad but true

Dreams are good things. Espicially when they are benificial to life as we know it. But before it can start in the Giant we call the media. It has to start at home. To many people care so little about what goes on to their neighbors, there local governments and so on. ( I'll admit I know not near enough about my local politics as I should) Most people just don't care. If it does not directly affect someone, it isn't a concern. And I can admit that happens. It sucks. But it happens. People just don't seem to care like they used to. But I think some of it is appethy(sp) too. For those that have tried ( whatever) and just keep getting shot down, time after time.....it is the feeling of there is no way to change...( whatever subject you like)

I'm rambling and now lost my train of thought.... AHHHHH



And now I think I have thrown this completely

So if i have we can move this topic somewhere else and keep the laundries topic here...
( even though it does sortta tie in with the whole thing....) I think

The several contributors who state that the despicable behaviour of the church is 'not what religion is about' just don't get it. The fact is that that is exactly what religion is about: mind control. Consider the father in the Magdalen Sisters who drags his escaped daughter back to the laundry and is so violent towards her. This behaviour is a direct result of indoctrinating a feeble mind with superstition. It is incredible that the pernicious evil of the church can make a father treat his own daughter in such a way.

People everywhere need to realize that reality is based on cause and effect; we gather information about both from observations. Observations are made with our biological senses of sight, sound, touch, taste; everything else is made up by someone! To trust in the bogus superstition of religion is quite literally to take leave of your senses.

Dear Mary Jace,

Firstly, let me say I believe in your right to believe in the metaphysical realm, but you need to realize that many of us here believe we are spiritual beings. That there is more to us than our five senses, and that something greater than ourselves created us and the world we live in. Now I can't speak for everybody and I would never try to, but having a particular belief in some kind of creator or higher-power doesn't make it superstition. Most who believe in God, will admit they have never met God in person, but still believe in the existence of said God. Even Albert Einstein, noted scientist, professed later in his life that it had to be an intelligent being or force who created the universe, because it is all too complex (paraphrase).
Now you said we learn through our senses, observation, and through reasoning, I agree this is true for the natural realm. Now what about the spiritual realm? You basically said in so many words that a spiritual realm or a belief in a higher spiritual being cannot exist because it cannot be perceived by our senses or intellect?
Let us reason together: Before the atom was split in order to create the A-bomb, no one had ever laid eyes on, or perceived through any other of the five senses an atom, much less its nucleus, and the electrons that rotated around it---correct? But still scientists theorized (believed) the existence of an atom and how it was made up---correct? Now today we have such high powered microscopes that we can see sub-atomic particles---correct? Just because you can't see, hear, feel, taste, or smell "something" doesn't negate the existence of that "something".

There is so much of our universe that we have not even tapped into or can begin to comprehend. We dare not be so bold to say we have found the key to unlock all its secrets. I believe it would take thousands upon thousands of life-times to figure it all out.

As for religious-nuts who abuse people in the name of their religion---they are plain crazy. But because they did this doesn't mean the core of the truth of that religion caused them to commit such crimes. Scientists around the world have committed such crimes of abuse toward their fellow man in the name of science---religion had nothing to do with it. Were these scientists feeble-minded when they believed they were committing these horrible experiments for the greater good of all, just as some feeble-minded Catholic person thought they were sending their children to these laundries was for the greater good of the community? I believe there is good and evil in this world---some choose the evil and some choose the good.

Please accept my humble rebuttal to your reply.

Is this behavior a direct result of religion? Or is it how one with a certain amount of authority deems to make it?
I am not Catholic, nor Christian I do not follow an "organized" religion" . But, I think when it comes down to it, it is really a discrase to humanity as a whole. In this case it happens to be in a convent run by the church. It is really no different than when blacks were used as slaves in the United States. They were put under the same conditions, even worse. So what made the slave owners do those things?

Yes, this topic happens to pop up about the church a lot of late. But, it happens EVERYDAY to kids, people, all over the world. The uncle that molest his 9 year old neice, the mom that makes her kids clean the floors with poisonous and caustic chemical with out gloves. It's happened! It happens everyday. Did religion make them do it? NO. It is the mind of a warped individual, or individuals. But Momma raping her sons friend, isn't nearly as juicy as a priest molested 15 kids in a 30 year span. Sorry... that is the media.....

So, I do not believe religion was to blame for this occourance. It happend in the parameters of the organization. That doesn't make the entire org bad. It's bad that they hide and move these indivduals. And yes gives it a bad name.
Saying that the religion ( it's beliefs) is bad thing. Is kindda silly. Know one curses the knife after it has been used to stab someone in the head 30 times........


Humbily, and feebily yours.....

Just an update

Last week, the Irish Govt announced that it was planning to narrow the scope of the commission investigating the child abuse allegations at RC-run instutitions in Ireland.

The Inquiry's chairman, Justice Mary Laffoy announced her resignation.

The commission is investigating 1800 cases of alleged abuses over six DECADES...

Another Irish minister defended the decision re changing the remit because he felt that at its current rate of progress it would run up legal costs of 300 Million punts and it might take another 10 years to report on its findings.

It's a sad reflection on Irish politics and a slap in the face to every one of those 1800 people - and to the many thousands more who decided not to make their abuse public knowledge....

For anyone intersted this films DVD/video release is 23, March.

Thanks for that bit of info, barddas!

maggiemahone1

That goes ditto for me! Thanks...Jason.

Nobody has mentioned the "Christian Brothers" who took Children sent from British orphanages on mass, and treated them to hard labour in Australia, Canada, New Zealand.
The parents of these children thought they were offering their children a great opportunity in life, so signed the concent forms.
This is a subject that haunts my family as at least four of my partners brothers and sisters were sent away.
The thought of the brutality and sexual abuse they could have suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church brings tears to my eyes.
this all took place in the 1950's and 1960's in Scotland and England.
The Catholic church has very little hold in Wales so I haven't heard of any forced emigrations of Welsh Children.
My Mother, Aunt and two Uncles were raised in Welsh Childrens homes during this time and they tell tales of love and care from the house mothers and masters.
the only homes that I know of in Wales are non religious based. so I could be wrong on my statement that Welsh Children were never part of the forced immigrations.
Jax

I seem to recall hearing, or reading something about this. But it does not stand out in my mind. Thanks for the info, Jax. And if you have any more please feel free to post.


Cheers

I saw an Australian documentary re the Christian Brothers homes in Australia and the British Govt's policy of shipping children to Aus, NZ and Canada.... It was a gut-wrenching documetary.... and the governments of the UK and Commonwealth countries colluded from the end of the war to the mid-60s....

Here is the text of a review of the programme

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/03/24/...main40269.shtml



The Lost Children

Feb. 3, 2002



(CBS) It's a mind-boggling story, one that sounds more like a bad movie than reality. But it happened. In the two decades after World War II, 10,000 English children were sent to Australia, reports 60 Minutes II Correspondent Bob Simon. Many were mistreated and abused. All were lied to.

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The story begins in Britain after World War II - a nation victorious but battered, broke, and burdened by overflowing children's homes. Many of the kids were put there by families too poor to raise them. What happened next is almost unfathomable in civilized countries or in modern times.

The British government, in collaboration with churches and charities, developed a secret plan to clear out these children's homes; a plan which has only recently been uncovered. The kids were told that they would be adopted by loving families in Australia. And they were shipped off by the thousands. It was as simple as that.

The first ship to sail in 1947 was the SS Asturias. Cargo: 147 boys and girls. John Hennessy, 11 years old at the time, was one of those children. Only a few weeks before it sailed, some priests and bureaucrats showed up at his children's institution in England. They were rounding up kids to go to Australia.

"We thought Australia was down the street or it was around the corner," says Hennessy. "How did we know it was on the other side of the world? Well, anyway, they, they came with the stories, you know, that there's fruits there, plenty of fruits."

Like many children, Mary Molloy didn't quite grasp what was being proposed: "I just thought, you know, we're going away for a while."

All across Britain, at children's homes and institutions, kids were being told the same thing: you're going to a new land, a new life, a new family. Many were illegitimate children. Many were dropped off by single mothers who'd fallen on hard times.

But that's not what the kids were told. Tony Jones, who at the time was in a boys' home in Malvern, England, was told that his parents had died: "They said, 'You're an orphan now.' And I was an orphan."

That's what they told all the kids, that they were orphans. That there was nobody for them in Britain.

Over the next 20 years, 10,000 children, somas young as 3, none older than 15, would depart unaccompanied for their new homes in Australia.

Six weeks and 12,000 miles later, the children arrived at the Fremantle docks in Western Australia. They looked around for the fruit trees, the kangaroos, the adoptive families they were told would be waiting for them. But there was none of that here. There was something quite different.

Not long after they disembarked, they received a lecture from a man in black, the archbishop of Perth.

Hennessy remembers the man's speech: "He said, 'We welcome you to Australia. We need you for white stock.' Because at this stage, the 'white Australia' policy was on. And we didn't know that we were part of the scheme to - to populate Australia with the - the white people. And the archbishop says, 'The reason why we do [is] because we are terrified of the Asian hordes!' Course, we didn't understand that."

These children were a commodity to a continent that was terrified of being overwhelmed by Asia. They had, in essence, been exported by a nation that had a surplus of white people.

Afterwards, the children's fingerprints were taken and they were herded into lines. Says Hennessy: "They grabbed the girls from their brothers. Brothers from their sisters, screaming. And I can still hear the screams today."

These children, who'd been plucked from institutions in Britain, were now trucked to all over Australia. Where? To institutions. No parents were waiting for them - just picks and shovels.

John Hennessy was sent to a place called Bindoon, an institution run by the Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks 60 miles from civilization in the sweltering bushland of Western Australia. Bindoon was a home and school for boys. But this was no Boys Town, and education was not the priority.

The priority was construction. Brother Francis Keaney, an imposing, white-haired Irishman who ran the place, was obsessed with building the largest Catholic institution in Western Australia. He used his charges as labor. From sunrise to sunset, the boys built Brother Keaney's shrine, with no shoes, and no questions asked.

Bindoon is a real school now, an agricultural college. But it's still run by the Christian Brothers. And old boys are not welcome, particularly not when they're accompanied by newsmen. When Bob Simon went back with Hennessy, who helped build Bindoon, they were kicked off the premises. The Christian Brothers are not eager to showcase their past as users and abusers of child labor.

"They got us dirt cheap," says Norman Johnston, another boy who helped build Bindoon. "We might as well have been slaves. And, you know, we endured all of that when we didn't have to."

For these children, there was nowhere to run. At the Fairbridge institution, sponsored by the Church of England, Tony Jones tried to escape whenever he could. He once made it as far as the docks where the children had first arrived.

Says ones: "I got down to the beach. I remember looking all over the ocean, and I asked this couple, 'Which way is England?' If there was land all the way across, I would have walked there. I would have walked there."

The food at the institutions seemed to have been cooked up in a Dickens novel. At Bindoon, the boys were so hungry one Sunday, 12-year-old John Hennessy led a raid on the vineyard out back. They enjoyed their grapes, but after mass the next morning, Brother Keaney was in a rage. He'd learned of the raid, and he called out for his leading suspect.

Then the man whipped him. "He stripped me naked," he says. "In front of 50 boys, put me across the chair and nearly flogged me to death. I've-I've-I've got medical advice that that's where I got the stutter from." He had never stuttered before that day, and has ever since.

The children say that floggings and beatings were part of a daily routine. The nightly routine with the Christian Brothers included priestly visits to the children's beds. The brothers were taking away boys who were less than 10 years old.

Hugh McConnell was 9 years old. One night, a bad storm hit Castledare, his children's home run by the Christian Brothers. Terrified that the world was coming to an end, Hugh ran outside and hid under a tree, where a Christian Brother found him. The man invited McConnell into his bed, where the boy fell asleep quickly. Later that night, the priest raped him.

There was no one to go to. Certainly not the Australian government, which was the legal guardian of the children. "The state supposedly were to be looking after us," says Johnston. "In the nine years I was institutionalized in Australia, I have never been spoken to by a child welfare officer. These Christian Brothers had us for what they wanted in those institutions. And they did with us what they would."

The head of the Christian Brothers in Western Australia, Tony Shanahan, admits that there was abuse, but he also suggests that some of the stories may have been exaggerated. A British government inquiry last year was more critical, saying that what happened at institutions run by the Christian Brothers in Western Australia was of "a quite exceptional depravity."

In 1993, the Christian Brothers, responding to a lawsuit, officially apologized to the child migrants and paid reparations totaling $2.5 million dollars to 250 who'd been abused at their institutions. The girls, who'd been sent to different places, suffered very little sexual abuse compared to the boys, but many were beaten, and all were exploited as free labor.

The shipments of both boys and girls stopped suddenly in 1967. The British simply didn't have any more children available for export.

But the 10,000 already in Australia? Only five - not 5,000 - were ever adopted. Few had birth certificates or documents of any kind. It seems their motherland wanted them to disappear without a trace.

Mary Mollogrew up in an institution outside Sydney. When she graduated into the real world and applied for a passport, she was in for a surprise.

"The only way I could get a passport was to become a naturalized Australian," says Molloy. "I thought I was. Now, to me, that was crazy. I've been out here since I was 9. I was brought out here. And yet, I wasn't acknowledged as an Australian. And yet, according to Britain, I didn't live there anymore. So, where was I?"

For decades, Britain was able to forget about the children it threw away. For decades, the children believed what they were told, that they were orphans.

But just a few years ago, these lost children - now lost adults scattered all over Australia - were stunned to learn that none of this was true. They weren't orphans at all.

The governments of Great Britain and Australia, the Catholic Church and the Church of England had not only exploited and abused these 10,000. They had conned the kids for 50 years.

Cat,

Thanks for posting the transcipt of that investigation from 60 Minutes II. I saw that interview a while back. It is so sad to hear. Right now this very moment children are being abused and used all over the world. My heart breaks for them. I think of my three tucked safely in their beds sleeping right now, and I shudder to think if someone would hurt or exploit one of them.

Roisin