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I recently watched the 2002 movie, “The Magdalene Sisters” and it has been haunting me and infuriating me ever since. Have you seen it?

Here’s the description from Netflix: Quote…This unflinching drama charts several years in the young lives of four “fallen women” who were rejected by their families and abandoned to the mercy of the Catholic Church in 1960s Ireland. While women’s liberation sweeps the globe, these women are stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite servitude in The Magdalene Laundries, so that they may atone for their “sins.” End quote.

In my ignorance, I had no idea that girls, probably less than a decade older than me, were being effectively jailed and abused, rather than cared for, by the Catholic church after they supposedly “fell from grace”. This order existed for decades, with the last asylum (their word) closing in 1996!!!!

This was happening in the 60’s, not in Victorian times, despite the dark era feel of the movie. What a power the moral hypocrisy of the Catholic institution was then. I suppose it still is for many even now.

In the reviews, many stated their feelings regarding this movie about real events and it seemed that several who were raised, as I was, in that church, had a particularly strong reaction to it. It certainly resurfaced many memories of my grade school years as a day student in a Catholic boarding school as several of the characters reminded me of nuns and discipline I encountered there. It seemed they were determined to take their unhappiness out on us and I suspect that shaped my previously overly quiet, watchful personality for years. The less you were noticed the better and as a girl who had recently lost her mom, I mastered that skill easily.

If one didn’t know that the treatment those nuns and priests metered out was about as far from Christian love as one could imagine, you could become very distant and bitter to God. The Catholic church, despite their claims, is an entity created by man, not a picture of a church as God wants it. Read Acts in your Bible and see how God really planned it. If you don’t have a Bible, go here and read it online: www.blueletterbible.com

Ok, this wasn’t intended to be a religious rant, but hey, that’s what you’ll get here every so often from this opinionated middle-aged woman who tries to be both a Christian and a feminist. I acknowledge that’s often a contradiciton in terms, but the right one wins out most.