The Sisters of Cruelty
Another pretty story from Ireland.
Kathleen, with her her sisters, Sarah Louise and Lydia, were taken from their mother in a dawn raid on their Dublin tenement home and found guilty in the children’s court of being “destitute” and “having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship”…“The people who took us from Mummy were paid a bounty by the religious orders because the nuns in turn received half a man’s wage per week for every child they took. It was a business. They called us destitute and uncared for, but that’s what they condemned us to — we were loved and cared for, but they took us away”…The regime at Moate was unremittingly grim. “I learnt to be quiet and not draw attention, that’s how I survived. We were the O’Malleys from Dublin, dirty jackeens from the slums was how they described us…It was drummed into me that I was worthless. We had our own nice clothes taken away and we were put into rags and worked from dawn til dusk in the laundry. We never played, we were sterile, we were given nothing. There was a rusty tap in the yard where we were allowed out for half an hour a day. We got an egg a year, a sausage a year, the rest of our food was slop and bread. We were allowed one half-hour visit a year from our mother, who would make a three-hour journey to see us and they wouldn’t even give her a glass of water. The annual visit took place in what was called ‘the poor-man’s room’ and it was supervised, with a nun present, so nobody could say anything they really wanted to say. It was horrible; there were always tears.”
And even all that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was even worse than all that.
“The worst part of the whole experience was how they actually poisoned my mind against my mother. The unforgivable part is that they told me and my sisters that my mother had given us up, that she didn’t want us. And we believed that for years. I only discovered in later life how hard she fought to get us back. She suffered so much. They bad-mouthed her to us, calling her a ‘streetwalker’.” One of Kathleen’s greatest regrets is having torn up the only photograph of her with her mother, at a time in life when she really did believe all the nuns had told her.
Yet Karen Armstrong would have us believe that compassion is central to all religion, and she never wearies of ordering us to agree with her about this. On page 307 of The Case for God, for example, she asserts that
The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.
We don’t mention it because we don’t believe in it. It’s that simple. We don’t believe it counts, because there is so much of the other thing. (Though there are exceptions. If Quakerism counts as one of the monotheisms, it’s an exception.) We don’t believe it’s good enough for religions to ‘espouse’ compassion while behaving like monsters of cruelty, and we also don’t believe that people should claim that religion stands for justice and compassion in the light of the history of Irish industrial schools, among other things. If it were really true that justice and compassion are central and important to religion, then the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ and the ‘Christian Brothers’ could not have acted the way they did. They would have recoiled and revolted. They didn’t recoil and revolt; they fell to the work with energy and dedication. Justice and compassion were foreign to the whole enterprise. It’s hard to come up with anything less just and less compassionate than tormenting children for the crime of being poor and born to a single mother – so the Irish catholic church on its own falsifies the whole idea that religion, of its essence, teaches compassion.
Well said, OB.
Of course, “…the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms…” would refer to Judaism, Islam and Zoroastrianism.
Catholicism is off the hook because it is a polytheism.
No, no, don’t say that, Ian! Mary and the saints and the trinitarian God aren’t polytheistic because…because…*crickets*
These stories are all heart-rending and I really do have to wonder if Armstrong has ever been questioned about it? Has anyone ever asked her, well, if it’s so compassionate than what about this?
At this point, I’m starting to believe that the purpose of religion is to subvert natural feelings of compassion and turn them to twisted ends.
I wonder the same thing about Armstrong.
We know Madeleine Bunting asked herself more or less that question, and admitted she was having a hard time answering it, when the Ryan report came out.
And I really do think it’s a poser for Armstrong. Because if her claim about compassion were true, then people really would feel a profound inner repugnance to treating children that way. Yet they felt nothing like that.
“We got an egg a year,”
Well, that was something indeed! I remember an incident as a teenager of another teenager in Goldenbridge, (who had the privilege of going to the outside national school) on one solitary occasion, bringing back from school a raw egg. She was apparently given it by a very kind extern kitchen sister from the convent beyond the industrial school on her return journey. She was always a ‘specia’l child, anyway. (Sisters of Mercy in general, who worked in the convent kitchen, were normally on the lower rung of the religious ladder and only ever worked at menial tasks and were also mostly treated with distain by the religious from the higher educated fields). Anyway, the teenager sneaked into the GB kitchen that night when no one was around – which was a very brave act, and turned on the warm tap, laid the egg – which she had heretofore placed on a desert-spoon – underneath it, for approximately ten minutes. When nothing happened she was terribly confused and distraught as she was convinced silly that the egg would be edible to eat. This very teenager was looked up to by lots of children – who never saw the outside world. She was classed as very knowledgeable! Well, her knowledge did not go as far as cooking an egg properly. From the day I entered Goldenbridge, to the day I left, I never had an egg to eat – let alone being in the privileged position of the teenager who waited and waited for one to cook from under a lukewarm tap of water. Her kitchen ‘look-out’ recounted the story to me some while back, as to this day she is still astonished by the fact that we were so ignorant when it came to eggs. Kathleen was lucky to have had an egg once a year – whatever about anything else in her life in the institution.
I am not well informed about the catholic church. Is the Irish brand particularly vile? If so, why?
Does the church in Italy or France or Ecuador pull this shit? I’ve never heard of kidnapping children from their homes in Mexico and charging them with the crime of being who they are, although that does not mean it never happened. An elderly Mexican deaf woman related her life story – her parents sent her to school w/nuns. They wanted her to be w/girls only, so they would not send her to the deaf school. She was the only deaf girl, and the nuns, including of course one of her aunts, basically turned her into their servant while the other girls actually learned to read and do math.
I’m sure there are pedophiles everywhere but charging children for being who they are as if it were a crime? That is especially evil. Is this an Irish Catholic specialty of some kind?
I like the fact that there is such a thing as “new atheism” because for the most-part you can judge the kind of religion they believe in on the basis of how they react to it. It’s like a litmus test, a radioactive dye, which lets you separate the genuinely compassionate people Armstrong wants to talk about (like the Church Times reviewer) from the ones that defend the church for the church’s sake (almost everyone else).
Sometimes I tell my friend who studies theology about the newest happenings in the world of new atheism. She just laughs at the drama (a healthy response), but in substance she is inclined to agree that the churches are rather screwed up. (Though ironically, she argues that this is something that the theologians have been arguing!)
“turn them to twisted ends.”
” So Twisted” was indeed the exact phraseology employed by solicitors in their summation of repeatedly heard testimonies of victims/survivors.
They just gasped at the ‘twisted ideology’ behind the treatment of incarcerated children at the hands of the religious. It was in their estimation just unfathomable!
They were absolutely mesmerised by the fact that so many victims/survivors from across the globe had exactly the same stories to tell.
Bruce Arnold has written a book called “Irish Gulag” as too has Mary Raftery/Eoin O’ Sullivan, “Suffer the Little Children”. I have not read either as they are too close ‘to the gulag’ for me to dip into indeed. The thought of not being able to ‘dip out’ is not a very pleasant one so regrettably I refrain. But, by all accounts they do give very vivd insights into the whole Irish complex system of industrial schools and the religious input into them in the past and are in that capacity to be recommended.
Karen Armstrong’s position seems to be summed up by “their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.”. She moves seamlessly from how she thinks a religion should be to claiming that is what it is.
Those pesky “new Atheists” just keep drawing facts and evidence into the discussion, no wonder they irritate her.
You are linking to the wrong article. The right link should be: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6882575.ece
As I have said before children from Goldenbridge were oftentimes threatened with “Moate”. The word itself scared the living daylights out of them. I distinctly remember a bi-racial girl being told that if she did not take the cheeky grin off her face she would be sent to Moate. She laughed inappropriately all the time when she was being reprimanded by Sr. F. There was another bi-racial girl – who grew up from early childhood in GB. Nobody ever told the grinning girl and the latter they were indeed sisters. They were well into their adulthood before they found out they were related. From my memory of them as children they never befriended each other.
I hope Kathleen finds her sibling. There is one small consolation – in that she knows that she has got a sister.
Judge McCarthy, who dealt with KO’M – also sentenced me, at less than five years old – to serve time in Goldenbridge.
As you know from reading the article, Kathleen and her siblings were deliberately sent to ‘Hell or Westmeath’. As this would have ensured the authorities and religious that she would have very little access to her mother. Dublin children in lots and lots of cases were sent far away for the same reason and their families were moreover or not brokenhearted because of lack of visitation rights.
Being in a Dublin industrial school never affected me as I never had a family vistior from the day I arrived in GB.
“Karen Armstrong’s position seems to be summed up by “their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.”. She moves seamlessly from how she thinks a religion should be to claiming that is what it is.”
Armstrong reminds me of a certain type of American conservative: the free-market ideologue, who, when presented with evidence that maybe unrestrained capitalism is destroying lives and the environemtn, cries “well, the market just isn’t free enough yet!” Armstrong, when presented with the reality of religion, complains that the practitioners aren’t doing it right.