Survivors of the Magdalene laundries are calling on Catholics to boycott mass tomorrow to protest the refusal of the church to pay compensation to the women.
I would love to say “do it!!” but I doubt that I have many readers who normally attend Catholic mass. Well, to tell the truth, I doubt I have any.
The group Magdalene Survivors Together asked people to stand with them and to withhold donations to local churches as a show of solidarity.
A spokesperson for the group said it was disappointed that the nuns are not contributing financially to a fund set up to provide compensation. The four orders have instead said that they will provide access to their records to allow for claims to be processed, and will continue to provide accommodation for the women who remain in their care.
Oh how generous. They’ll do what they should do anyway (how could they withhold access to “their” records?) but they won’t do what they ought to do if they had a shred of conscience.
The four orders involves are the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity.
One survivor said it would be a “simple but powerful way” of sending a message to the four congregations.
“Why can’t they do the right thing? Why do they want to make us suffer like this?” asked Marina Gambold. “They made us suffer behind closed doors may years ago and now they are doing it in public that is shocking, disappointing and disgusting.”
But not surprising.
Boycotting mass is fine – I’ve been doing it myself for sixty years – but what they really need is to have catholics worldwide boycott the collection plate and their pledges. The only thing RCC Inc understands is money. Whatever they do, or don’t do, is calculated not on ethical concerns but on keeping those revenues coming in…..
I boycott religion as a whole, but if they want me to boycott Catholic mass specifically this weekend, I’m happy to do so. Unfortunately, I doubt if it’ll make much of an impact on the Pope.
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the nuns don’t want to pay up Magdalen Laundry Survivors. They tried a similar caper with survivors in Industrial “Schools” at the outset of the institutional child abuse debacle in the nineties. I have it from the horse’s mouth that they wanted to give ex Goldenbridge inmates (who were at the coalface) E1,000 in counselling, and for them to acknowledge that they’d been cured of their past pain.
Survivors who suffer from every conceivable mental health problem listed in the American psychiatric journal because of systemic abuse bestowed on them throughout their childhood (along with other causes, of course) were supposed to be magically cured with E1,000 counseling fees from the religious. The latter saw themselves as being being very generous. What a joke!
I’m glad Christine Buckley saw through their miserly, craftiness. I don’t think there would have been a commission to inquire into child institutional abuse if the nuns had been reasonable with survivors from Goldenbridge at the very beginning. All the survivors were looking for at that time was to recoup counselling fees that had been paid personally by them for years, and for all survivors to receive adequate ongoing counselling. The nuns weren’t budging. Hence survivors going to the government. The rest is history.
I think the nuns can try to mess around with Magdalen Laundry survivors far more easily, as they’re working from the other end of an inquiry spectrum.
Magdalen Laundry survivors have been brought to their knees over and over again by the religious, just as they were when they were serving penitentiaries in the laundries. Undoubtedly, the religious have very powerful legal teams behind them, who will be advising them what to do.
I think that by MLS aiming at the heart of the matter, which is the church collection box, it would symbolically be a thorn in the sides of the Roman Catholic Church. Stopping the religious heart-flow will cause the religious river to run dry.
You’d think making sure anyone still in their “care” can get out of it as soon as possible would be the priority.
sailor1031 @1: The only thing RCC Inc understands is money. Whatever they do, or don’t do, is calculated not on ethical concerns but on keeping those revenues coming in …
With all due respect I would replace this by (political) power, tho’ of course with the one you can get the other. Money doesn’t really explain their relentless harping on theological gynecology; and the abuse of altar boys, like any other kind of rape, involves power as much as it does sex. Still, the collection basket is as good a place to start as any.
Corvus; certainly political power is what we see exercised but IMO that power is based on money, as is power just about everywhere. Would anybody have given Mittens the time o’day if he wasn’t enormously, and undeservedly, wealthy? I think if the cash supply were cutoff RCC Inc Corporate would have to fold. Of course there are too many useful idiots and fellow travellers to let that happen..