Thursday, June 12, 2014

Barry Clifford: "It was part of the system and culture of the times."

One of Ireland’s wealthiest religious orders recently said this about the Magdalene laundries/prisons that they ran for profit: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.” This explained everything away in the past and of that yet to come to the light for this sadistic bunch of nuns, and by extension the Catholic Church as a whole.

The fact is it was the Irish Catholic version of that religion that was the system and culture of the time for you could not separate one  without the other wrapped within a constitution similar to an Islamic state. It had pervaded every crevice of Irish society: the arts, education, sport, and health, that in turn fostered a twisted prejudice and interpretation of what was morality was. Quickly a two-tier system of castes sprang from it. The joy of flesh against the sin of it, the child classed to being illegitimate to give a moral legitimacy, the whore mother to the bastard child. There were places you could put these lower castes and like the prostitutes of today, they or their children would not be missed, and for the most part it was true.

The fever from fear of the untouchables spread: Mother and father turned against daughter and their very own grandchildren whether boy or girl. Hope only lay in moral servitude and to give up your child. Those children that did not make it any further than that childhood were consigned to the mass graveyards of anonymity; for the still living the drudgery and indentured slavery went on amid the sounds of the Industrial farm Institutions and Magdalene laundries that boosted upward the coffers of the Irish Catholic Church both here and abroad. A whole legal system protected it and the rights of the child was less than that of an animal.

This was the system and culture of the times that lasted until 1997 in Ireland when the last Industrial/reformatory for children closed its oak and metal barred prison doors for the last time. Their secrets are only now coming to light with each one darker than the last and subject to great resistance from the faithful for the promise of everlasting life can make you deny anything that threatens it.

Yet the Church is still largely in charge of Ireland today; still running the schools, the universities, the colleges, and the main charities. They have re-invented themselves too. Fr Trendy’s with communication and marketing degree’s fronting companies that have more to do with dodgy banking than presiding at Mass. Apologies for their past sins are couched in removing themselves from the scene of the crime by still blaming the system and the culture of times past yet that hold only them alone in the frame of it. 

Scant compensation has been paid relevant to what they have gained from that past and indeed present and the beat goes on. Their tentacles are wrapped too tight now to be made accountable for they are in many ways bigger than most Governments, Catholic ones anyway. The Church even claimed that it was them that did the most to combat child abuse though they stand among a select group who engaged in it and hid so well.

It is not a hopeful note but one that I carry for once, for many more gravesites will be found, more hand wringing will be done, more apologizes and trembling lips will banner atonement without the sincerity behind the eyes, before change itself comes. That change will only be the beginning of the end for this religion as we know it for it cannot stand on its own lies and currency of superstition any longer. Take away the oxygen of money and it will die sooner.


Barry Clifford   

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