i was raised catholic and the people who taught me were excellent. they taught me that all are god's children and all, no matter if you are two legged or four legged, deserve to live with dignity and fairness and equality.

however, i am finding more often that the hierarchy of the catholic church actually does not believe this teaching. this is proven by the denial of responsibility of the sexual abuses that have been carried out by many sick individuals who continue to receive the protection of the church.

the very latest offenses that have come to light in the movie houses all over the world are the infamous laundries of ireland. the abuses carried out by the priests, nuns and bishops included, are INEXCUSABLE!! i knew the laundries had existed but i did not know that they had remained open till 1996. the true opinion of women has been revealed by this action of the hierarchy of the catholic church. to blatantly deny the atrocities that were committed against these tens of thousands of women is an act by the vatican to SANCTION these atrocities and to protect the CRIMINALS that had carried out these atrocities.

so far, i have not heard of any action to be taken by the vatican to apologize, to make reparations to these women, to help the women find their children that were sold through the black market. BABY DEALING is disgusting especially when it is the priests of these awful places that used to regularly rape these women, the women would have the babies and the babies were sold!! to use these places as BREEDING GROUNDS just so MONEY COULD BE MADE goes 100% against the teachings of jesus christ when he THREW OUT the merchants from the temple.

i used to have the utmost respect for pope john paul. but when i found out that the last laundry was closed in 1996... i find his inactivity against these crimes against women to be truly disgusting and he is no better than the rapist who carried out the act. now, i hope all of you get what you deserve when you finally meet god on your death bed.

thank you for giving me a clear conscience for breaking free from the tyranny that exists in your patriarcal hierarchical world.

-- catherine lynn buchanan (clbuch@yahoo.com), September 09, 2003

Answers

History according to Hollywood. A Hollywood which is blatantly anti-Catholic. I suggest you consult more reliable sources before flipping out over what you saw in a MOVIE!

-- Paul (PaulCyp@cox.net), September 09, 2003.

Do you REALLY THINK this movie was an unbiased "documentary" which was not a WORK OF FICTION but an actual video-tape of reality???

I mean, here you are, condeming the Pope for actions depicted in a movie which portrays 4 women who never existed and nuns and other characters who never existed... every character is a "composite" of several people - and this is admitted to by the director himself. So who did the composition? He did. A male human did. Yet you think men are ipso facto evil monsters who only enslave and repress women.

I find it weird that you believe the movie director is infallible in his potrait of every detail, while yourself condemn as directly morally guilty the Pope who last I checked, doesn't run laundries and doesn't have direct oversight into orders of women religious (which are all autonomous and run by WOMEN)!

Read Canon Law! Abottesses and Mother superiors of orders of nuns and religious are ELECTED BY THEIR PEERS AND RULE OVER THEIR SISTERS. They have duties and rights that not even local bishops (men) can mess with. And this has been the case since at least the 1200's!

So much for the tyranny of patriarchical hierarcical worlds! If anything you should rant and rave about the abuse women do to women!

Wasn't Margaret Sanger a woman? She founded Planned Parenthood - the organization that has done more to subjugate and harm women and defenseless children around the world than any other. She equated pregnancy with disease and was a Nazi-supporter of state-enforced sterilization and forced abortion programs.

Didn't Queen Elizabeth rule England in the 1600's? She killed 4 times as many civilians, including women and children than her predecessor, Queen Mary. Why aren't you ashamed of these women?

As for Catholic sexism... the Church teaches us that the human race did not "fall" when Eve sinned. It only fell from grace when Adam sinned. THUS FROM ALL TIME THE CHURCH HAS PROCLAIMED THAT SIN ENTERED THE HUMAN RACE NOT THROUGH THE WOMAN, BUT THROUGH THE MAN!

Women were not held responsible for the death of Jesus Christ: men were.

Women were not held responsible for lust or sins of the flesh - Jesus directed his words at MEN!

Your lack of appreciation of history, theology, and Catholic praxis is absolutely amazing. Especially since all your wrath is based on a movie!

-- Joe (Joestong@yahoo.com), September 09, 2003.

Is this another church coverup like the sex abuse scandal? Will the faithful turn a blind eye again? How sad. Do a search for Catholic laundries in Ireland and see what you come up with. Not all reports are from tv & movie critics or advocates. What would it take for church members to acknowledge abuse & mis-use of power? I really would like to know; is there anything that church members would say NO to if it's done by the religious & priests?

http://www.childmigrants.com/the_magdalene_sisters.htm

-- Sarah Lynnel (nospam@nospam.com), September 09, 2003.

Catholics don't claim priests and bishops and nuns are perfect. They aren't. Every day in Mass everyone, including the priests admit to being sinners in need of conversion.

The problem is that you don't go from the individual failures of individual Catholics - be they leaders or followers - to sweeping generalizations and sweeping moral condemnation of DOCTRINE as though the faith was wrong and directly responsible for the moral failures.

Why is the Catholic Church - all billion members of it - morally guilty for the sins of less than 0.01% of its members? Why is the Church morally guilty of the hypocrisy and moral failure of priests or nuns...especially since the Church itself teaches that their actions were and are sinful and wrong?

If the Church taught that rape, slavery, and abuse was OK and excusable... then the Church would be "wrong" and forfeit moral authority. But the Church never taught - in any Council and in any Pontifical document that rape, slavery, and abuse of women and children was OK.

Yes, some nuns and priests sinned in the laundries. Yes bad things happened. But that wasn't the whole story of Irish Catholicism or the whole story of Catholicism itself. It's like making the bigoted, generalization that one guilty black person means the whole ethnic group is criminal... or that if 500 out of 46,000 priests (100,000 priests if you count all those from the last 40 years) are guilty, then ALL ARE GUILTY. 1.08% of priests in the last 40 years do not make the Catholic priesthood or celibacy or any Catholic doctrine the immediate morally culpable cause of pedophilia!

Yet virtually ALL CRITICS OF THE CHURCH use examples of individual failures and sin to sniff "well, I don't have to obey the Gospel anymore", as though there was a direct causal link between the Gospel, the nature of the Church, doctrine, etc. and moral depravity.

No one else in society is held to the same twisted moral judgement. Some politicians are corrupt - as are many university professors. But very few outraged people call for the overthrow of the political system and the dismantling of the university system! Yet that's what happens to the Catholic Church!

Lots of political parties - for example, the Democrats in 1964, came out in favor of segregation...and were wrong, but no one called for the immediate dismantling of the party, and the eternal condemnation of its members.

The United States Government (under Roosevelt) authorized the interning of Japanese-American citizens in camps. Did that act of massive injustice make the US Constitutional system automatically evil, wrong, in need of radical change and eternally remove moral authority from the rule of law? No. Why not? that's what happens to the Catholic Church when 0.001% of its members mess up all by their lonesome, in disobedience to their vows and to Church teaching!

I say: punish those who are PROVEN GUILTY, not merely those who are accused or those who happen to be in the same time zone. Otherwise it's like gardening with nuclear weapons - kill the weeds...and everything else for miles around!

-- Joe (Joestong@yahoo.com), September 09, 2003.

The world hated him, so the world would DEFENITELY hate us, his followers. Satan is the king of this world. Those who seek glory in this world is under his influence. We seek glory in God, so it is only natural that the rest of the world hate us. We have to suffer these insults, injustice and all bad things to ultimately get to him, because the road is not smooth and comfortable, but filled with thorns. Satan will never rest, and he will help in everyway those who try to ridicule the followers of christ. We have to suffer, and we will, for ultimately we'll see who laughs in joy and who cries in pain. The word of God never lies. His promises will always be fulfilled, and his words are for all time.

-- Abraham T (lijothengil@yahoo.com), September 11, 2003.

I feel that the way these women were made to suffer is unexcusable. Society has changed so much since then that we find it hard to believe that such things went on. I too found the film shocking and wanted to believe that there was a lot of dramatization of the scenes so the film would be popular because everybody wants to see films that shock them. What really surrised me is that I found out that my mother who is Irish, had a friend who was in one of these institutions so I know the film is based on true accounts and that these awful things did go on.

It is awful that the last one closed in 1996 but hopefully we as a society we will have learnt our lesson that religion is not a law but a way to live.

-- Emily Nelhams (enelhams@hotmail.com), November 17, 2003.

A lot of you are focusing on the wrong issues. It doesnt matter if you found out about the laundries through the newspaper, a book or saw it on the silver screen, these things happended and you cant justify and rationalize it away. You can say the entire church is corrupt or blame each individual for their actions, but two points come to mind: The church certainly didnt do anything about it and had plenty of time to do something. More importantly, I thought God was the only one who could judge anyone. If everyone is a sinner, including priests and nuns, then how can one drowning man save another drowning man? The way I see it, it doesnt matter if the bible said a man or a woman caused the downfall of the human race or the death of jesus, thats pretty irrelevant in this circumstance. What is relevant is that these nuns and priests had no right in the first place to judge these women and certainly not to degrade them in the way that they did.

-- emilie (catawapala@hotmail.com), January 01, 2004.

I have just watched the film, even though I have obviously heard of these laundries before. I would like to respond to PaulCyp@cox.net by saying that this is NOT just a film, a work of fiction. This was reality and Catherine has every right to 'flip' out about it. My mother has told me that her aunt was in one of these god-forsaken places and they were actually a lot worse than is portrayed in the film. My mum was taught by nuns, and even today she says that they were the most evil twisted human beings, who revelled in the power that they had. Oh the hypocrisy of religion! If there really were a god, then surely he would never allow such cruelty, all given out in his name. So, PaulCyp@cox.net, you shouldn't jump to conclusions that Catherine is just being taken in by a film, much in the same way that some people think that Coronation Street is real......she may have some experience of these laundries in her family history....which, somehow, I am sure you have NOT.

-- maxine williams (pogleswood@hotmail.com), February 21, 2004.

My guess would be that Maxine doesn't know any present day nuns.

In Christ, Bill

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45@hotmail.com), February 21, 2004.

I didn't say that the subject of the film was not a historical reality. I simply said that it is a film, and as such portrays what the director wants it to portray, which may be close to or miles apart from the actual reality. Anyone who thinks they know the truth about a subject because they watched a movie based on the subject is a very gullible person. What they have watched is one person's personal beliefs and interpretations of a subject, which may be far removed from objective truth, especially if the director has strong personal feelings, pro or con, regarding the subject matter.

I was also taught by religious sisters. Holy, caring, dedicated, intelligent women who, along with my parents, gave me my foundation in the faith, as well as a quality academic education.

-- Paul M. (PaulCyp@cox.net), February 21, 2004.

I always wondered how the parents could send a child away, just like that.

From what I've read about the movie, the main characters are composites from several first-hand accounts. I haven't read anything yet that said the director was doing this out of a sense of real malice or anything.

Paul, the same argument (as far as personal opinions and interpretations) could be made about Mel Gibson's movie, or any book, for that matter.

-- GT (nospam@nospam.com), February 21, 2004.

Of course it could! Mel has made no secret of his personal agenda as director of this film. His film is "about" Christ. So was "The Last Temptation of Christ". But someone who bases his image of Christ on one of these movies is in a far different place than someone who bases his impressions of Christ on the other.

-- Paul M. (PaulCyp@cox.net), February 22, 2004.

It is interesting that the ones who are not outraged, who claim this film a work of fiction, are men. I attended a convent school in the 1950's through 1970. In watching this film I wept through most of it, for not just the four women but for all the nameless women that passed through Magdelene Asylum/Laundry. Not everyone raised in a Catholic environment was surrounded by loving and nurturing Nuns, or caring and kindly Priests. That is not a statement of fiction.

-- Delores Landeis (Dee1952@hotmail.com), June 13, 2004.

What was the point of the movie? By all accounts those who saw it come to the conclusion - based on the movie - that the whole Catholic Church is guilty. The film makes no distinctions to show that these asylums were the exception rather than the rule.

So anyone with no knowledge of Catholicism is led to conclude that nuns are not complex and frail human beings like the victims and like the rest of humanity, but rather are two-dimensional monsters, supported by equally two dimensional priests who are twisted by the very faith and structure of Catholicism!

Many people who see the film come out not with the idea that abuse is unacceptible and leave it at that, but with the conviction that the whole religious system, the very idea of religious orders, celibacy and obedience ought to be blamed, that the Church (which has no Inquisition anymore) ought to have known, and failing to know, ought have no moral authority anymore.

The "moral" of the story is to either leave the Church or hold it in contempt and fight it as a real threat to civilization and freedom.

Yet Catholicism NEVER taught that what went on in those asylums...the abuse...was hunky dory and OK. No Pope, no council, no bishop or saint, no doctor or Church father ever promoted the idea that women can be enslaved, brutalized and abused! Yet watching the movie you'd never know that this is so!

This is what I take exception to: the idea that a movie director with known biases against the Church, who weaves together an obviously hatchet-job of a movie clearly slamming the whole Church for the crimes of a few... gets away with the message that this was what Irish Catholicism was all about, period.

In Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, there were multiple "sides" to the Jewish people: heros and anti-heros. Good jews and bad, neutral and committed. In other words, a complex scene with no simple black and white line drawn. Even so half the Jewish world condemned him for promoting anti-semetic stereotypes and claimed the movie would provoke actual violence against Jews.

Yet here we have a movie that only shows nuns and priests in a seriously bad light, implying that their Church itself and faith itself is suspect and bad... but we get post after post of women who applaud "yet another brave director who wasn't afraid to tell the truth"....and you don't see the irony?

Catholics routinely get ripped on through books (Da Vinci Code, Left Behind series) and movies (Dogma, Seven Capital Sins, Priest, Last Days, etc etc)...routinely fed to the lions with the simplistic: 1% of members are immoral, therefore all members are either monsters or naive, the faith and institution must be guilty, and "freedom" must mean apostasy....

And we're supposed to just continue to meekly take it while whole generations are not only growing up with seriously wrong historical understanding but also ever increasing vitriolic responses? How many of you know that Catholic Churches get fire-bombed, that Catholic priests and nuns - in this country - have been shot? The National media seeks out and highlights any violence against Jews and Muslims...but if a Catholic Church is burned to the ground...if it is looted, if the local priest is robbed or shot... at most this makes only local news.

Why is this so? Obviously because Catholics don't deserve to be treated like everyone else in our "pluralistic society" where all views are welcome except theirs.

In history (as the Jews so elloquently tell us), bloody persecutions always start by cultural emphasis on the dark side of any given group of people: twisted stories which demonize and de-humanize the target group as "only" and always corrupt, evil, hateful. Then this group is made the target of punitive laws, and finally, physical violence, all in the name of human liberty and freedom.

Right now, no other group of human beings are treated this way except Catholics (and possibly white caucasian males). When was the last time you saw any group of people except Catholics and white men treated this way on film?

All this doesn't mean that the Church is 100% perfect! Nor that bad things didn't happen in Ireland...just that from the wake of this movie and others, no attempt at all is made by director or actors or fans to BALANCE the moral of the story with qualifiers such as "not all nuns and priests are like this".

And the director could easily have made this case in 40 seconds on film by showing other nuns and priests in Ireland at the time and in missions around the globe, doing good selflessly. He chose not to. I wonder why?

-- Concerned catholic (anonymous@yahoo.com), June 14, 2004.

An interesting report on sex abuse among OTHER groups in American society that get a COMPLETE PASS by the major news media so bent on slamming Catholics....

Far more teachers, coaches, and clergy of other groups are found guilty of sex abuse of minors (both in actual numbers and statistically) than are Catholic priests and nuns...but since only Catholics and especially Catholic clergy are fair game in the Media, they're the only ones who get fed to the lions.

http://www.catholicleague.org/research/abuse_in_social_context.htm

-- concerned Catholic (anonymous@yahoo.com), June 14, 2004.