Abuse by Church In Ireland's Industrial Schools

I was recently talking with a Disqus friend about the 2003 film, The Magdalene Sisters, about three young women in Ireland who were sent to the infamous Magdalene Laundries, run by Ireland’s Catholic church. The Republic of Ireland has traditionally been a Catholic country and has experienced scandals involving the church’s treatment of women and children. Ireland's Industrial School system was also administered by Catholic priests and nuns.

BACKGROUND – SCHOOLS AND LAUNDRIES

The first I heard of the history of the industrial schools and laundries was from the film, which is a fictionalized account of three real women sent to a laundry. Life at these laundries involved extreme physical hardship (starvation and beatings) with intense labor, as laundry was not yet mechanized in Ireland. Physical and sexual abuse from the nuns who ran the institutions was rampant (see link to Child Abuse Commission report at the end of this post), as well as sexual abuse of younger girls by administrators (both religious and laypeople) and older girls.

Why were girls and young women sent to the laundries and schools? Reasons varied from a church moral violation such as pregnancy or sex before or outside marriage, all the way to simple flirtatious behavior, or even fear that she was “too pretty” and would eventually get herself into “trouble.”

Here’s the film trailer:

This just in! The Catholic church is still backwards!

Newsflash of the century! Or maybe, the half-century. NPR did a piece this morning about the 50-year anniversary of the Vatican II council. Apparently it has been ambiguous that despite "liberalization" of the Church, it remains a backwards, antiquated institution!

In the aftermath of the council, says Mickens, the Vatican correspondent, the church lost the opportunity to come to terms with its longstanding nemesis – the liberal ideas ushered in by the French Revolution. "We really haven't made our peace as a Catholic Church, as an institution, with the Enlightenment," Mickens says. "The Vatican is a great example. It's an absolute monarchy. The Enlightenment got rid of all that."

The Rev. Reese, who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center, says the current church is unable to communicate with the world around it.

Wow! I'm so surprised. An institution set up in neolithic Palestine doesn't quite have the same relevance in the modern world 2000 years later.

In other news, water is wet, bears shit in the woods, and the Pope is Catholic.

More disproof of Christian theology

I've spoken about this topic a little bit before in this post about the disproof of Catholic theology, and it seems to be popular, so I'll give it another go for the avid readers. However, to avoid the illusion that I'm just picking on Catholics, I'll extend this to others who don't necessarily believe in original sin.

I'd like to argue that not only is there no conception of original sin given the fact of human evolution, but moreover, that the cards were stacked against humans from the get-go, by simply looking at the conditions we all evolved in throughout the last 13.7 billion years since the rapid inflationary period (commonly referred to as the "Big Bang"). This is inconsistent with observations about nature, and hence is a contradiction.

Disproof of Catholic theology

I'm watching the show "Q&A", where Richard Dawkins and George Pell are having an open debate, fielding questions from the audience. One of the questions centers around evolution, and the Catholic church's viewpoints there. A short summary is that Pell admits that evolution happened (although completely botching the details, claiming humans evolved from Neandertals somehow... facepalm), but that somewhere there must have been a "first human" who had a "soul".

While this is great for those Catholics who are looking for a way out of being both Catholic AND avoid disbelieving in scientific fact, if you scratch it a bit, it reveals the entire house of cards that the Catholic religion is, and it comes tumbling down.