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No further comment.
Sisters of Our Lady of Charity?
No further comment.
Good Shepherd Sisters?
No further comment.
United Nations Committee Against Torture?
A full investigation, is it?
What say you, Conference of Religious in Ireland? What say you, Sisters, about the Magdalene laundries your orders ran, and profited from, for decades, now that the UN has called for the government to launch a full and complete investigation into the Magdalene laundries?
Suddenly, the religious orders are speaking up, but if your shite detector is sounding an alarm, there's good reason.
Women who failed to toe the party line on morality were locked up in the laundries. Some of them were pregnant but not married. Some of them were unmarried orphans living with post-pubescent brothers, at moral risk of sexual something or other. There were victims of sexual abuse, women made pregnant through rape, women who ran afoul of the local parish priest, all incarcerated and put to work without pay.
To understand the severe psychological damage caused, read The Leaven of the Pharisees. And understand why the religious orders, once they were caught, had no comment to the onslaught of questions.
With the UN involved, the focus has shifted from Irish eyes to the eyes of the world, and the Catholic Church is awash in bad publicity from the clerical sex abuse scandal. The members of CORI are in full damage control.
"This is a sad, complex and dark story of Irish society," say the four religious congregations. They're not alone in fielding blame. They're pointing their fingers back at you, Irish people who knew what was going on behind those thick walls and sent your dirty clothes there just the same.
"We are willing to participate in any inquiry that will bring greater clarity, understanding, healing and justice in the interests of all the women involved," their statement continues. So if they deem the inquiry as a witch hunt, as something meant to damage the Catholic Church, they won't participate.
And if they don't think the interests of their victims are being looked after, that's the end of it as well.
Not quite a ringing endorsement of the fight being waged by Justice for Magdalenes.
Read the statement and you'd have to believe that every politician learned the fine art of obfuscation and weaseling from a Sister of Mercy. There's nothing being said that guarantees their cooperation. It's a pretty little collection of words that sound like a step forward, but the content is as hollow as anything else the religious have said about their treatment of Ireland's underprivileged.
Will the Sisters cooperate in a way that's meaningful? Will they suddenly be able to find records of forced adoptions that they say they lost long ago? Will they ever be able to identify the women buried in unmarked graves, the women whose names were taken from them when they were incarcerated?
I won't be holding my breath.
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