“I didn’t see anything godly about that church. I didn’t see anything Christ-ly. All I saw was a bunch of bullies.”
Just finished watching The Magdalene Sisters and the documentary found on the same DVD, called “Sex in a Cold Climate.” Not an uplifting way to spend an evening, I’ll tell you what. It’s about the Magdalene asylums, institutions found up until 1996 all over Ireland, where women were sent for having children out of wedlock, for having been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted and so dishonored…
…or just for being pretty.
That way, they wouldn’t go astray.
A CBS News article from 2003 is chilling: the atrocities of those places were not discovered until 1998, and not reported until 1999. Up until five years ago, Ireland didn’t know that up to thirty thousand of its women were imprisoned and forced into slave labor in the Magdalene laundries. They were beaten into submission, scarred by being announced sinners who had lost heaven, forced to work “six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year” (documentary) for no pay. Many had lost their children to foster homes, adoptions, orphanages.
Some of the Magdalenes were sexually abused by the priests who came to take confession and give Sunday masses. Some women escaped, some went mad, some lived out their lives in the laundries from the time they were girls barely into puberty until the day they died. What kind of church, what kind of religion breeds such cruelty?
The same religion that institutionalized the abandonment of children born out of wedlock, babies dying by the thousands of neglect, lack of nutrition and syphilis – but at least they’d be baptized. At least, they’d go to heaven.
People genuinely believed this, and operated anonymous infant drop-offs until only a century ago.
Until less than a decade ago, women were imprisoned and enslaved by the thousands in Europe.
Don’t forget for a second. We are not out of the dark ages yet. Read this article, read it carefully, and then do me a favor and make an offering to the goddess of fertility.
Love and lovemaking are the reasons we are. A curse on those who profane that.
