Frank says they’re sorry but…
I wrote my column for The Freethinker yesterday. I wrote it about the pope’s visit to Ireland. The whole subject makes me rather cross.
The sentimental view of religion is that it makes people good, meaning kind and generous and compassionate. If that were true, surely there wouldn’t have been such an enormous gulf between how the Sisters of Mercy (oh the irony of that name) saw their administration at Goldenbridge and how the survivors saw it. Surely, surely, a religion talented at making ordinary people peculiarly kind and loving would not come up with physical and verbal abuse of captive children seized from impoverished mothers as an example of its holy work.
Also, religion is supposed to be timeless and absolute; it’s supposed to create the standards and values, not dumbly follow those that already exist. Yet how did the “Sisters of Mercy” explain the rampant sadism at Goldenbridge?
You’ll never guess.
Additional to the Sisters of Mercy, police in Lanarkshire, Scotland, have recently made 12 arrests over the 2003 discovery of the unmarked mass grave of over 400 children in a cemetary near the Smyllum Park orphanage, which was run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, a women’s society within the Catholic church. The 12 have been charged with non-recent abuse of children.
Strange definitions of mercy and charity.
https://news.sky.com/story/nuns-among-12-arrested-over-historical-abuse-at-orphanage-in-scotland-11480033
Here’s an almost Trump-esque excerpt from a statement issued by two of the Sisters of Charity after they told an inquiry last year that they could find no records of any abuses at the home (emph. mine):
We are against abuse…..we apologise to those we abused! https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-41200949
Now, Ophelia, you speak of those children as if they were innocent! Don’t you know we’re all born with Original Sin, and it has to be beaten out of children if they’re to grow up and be saved from hell? What’s a childhood spent being tortured against the eternity of torture Our Heavenly Father has in store for us if we don’t obey?
Priorities, woman.
Buuuut the nun who administered Goldenbridge herself cited the standards of the time, implying that she now agrees they were wrong. (Excuse literal answer. It’s just that it’s so dumbfounding.)
We still don’t seem to have even a body count for Tuam. Where is the sort of forensic effort one would expect when mass graves are discovered in suburban back yards rather than convents and orphanages?