Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9311070226
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dick PolmanPhiladelphia Inquirer
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
Kathleen Maher went looking for the ladies the other day. A stiff wind swept across the dense forest of headstones. She extended her arms, as if groping in the darkness.
"The spirits will guide me to them," she insisted. "I can feel them. Back when I was a Magdalen, I used to feel I was more in tune with the dead anyway, because the living seemed so much less trustworthy."
There's not much to see at graveside, just wilted flowers on fresh gravel. There are no names on the headstone, nothing to mark the fact that these 133 women, who toiled in obscurity, have become the focus of a national scandal.
For more than 150 years, until the early 1970s, thousands of Irishwomen, like Maher, were relegated to lives of unpaid servitude in Catholic convents, working as laundresses. They were hidden away - unwed mothers, daughters of unwed mothers, prostitutes, orphans, nonconformists. The women take their name from Mary Magdalene, a repentant woman cited in the Bible as an early follower of Christ.
The existence of these women was long suppressed by a conspiracy of silence. No more. The silence was broken this autumn, when a local Magdalen convent destroyed the graves of 133 Magdalen women to make way for a real estate development. The resulting public outcry has put the Catholic hierarchy on the defensive.
"So many people in Irish society, women especially, have suffered," said Margo Kelly, whose unwed mother became a Magdalen. "But this has taken the lid off. For the first time in our lives, we've got the chance to speak out. Ireland is changing. We're more educated now. It's time for people like me to get answers to certain questions."
Kathleen Maher was taken from her unwed mother in 1948 when she was 8 months old. The nuns raised the daughter, who grew up working 12-hour days in the convent laundry.
"I so much wanted all this to come out," said Maher, who left the convent when she was 18. "For years, it was too hard to ring anyone up to talk about it. We needed a trigger. Now we have one."
The trigger that put a spotlight on the laundries (14 of 20 were in Dublin) was a decision by a city convent, High Park, to get rid of its red ink. It sold some prized land, for an undisclosed price, to a real estate developer. But beneath part of the land were the coffins of 133 Magdalens, the last of whom had died in 1983.
In September, the convent cremated the bodies and shipped the ashes to a nearby cemetery, without informing surviving relatives. But a local paper ran a story, and suddenly dozens of Magdalen relatives, most of whom had nursed their secrets for decades, came out of hiding. In the subsequent public outcry, at least 10,000 people have signed a book of condolences. There's a campaign to erect a monument to the women.
Pat McDonnell, a housewife from Dunshaughlin, is still smarting over the treatment of a Magdalen relative, orphaned as a teen-ager in the 1940s and sent to the convent by a Galway priest. He had decreed that she was in moral danger because she liked to stay out late. So he put her in a convent laundry, with her brothers' tacit approval, and it took them 20 years to get her out.
This was not unusual. Legally, the Magdalen women were free to leave. But they were locked in at night, and they were regularly told that society didn't want them. They were often moved to different laundries, which is why the McDonnell family spent fruitless years tracing their sister. When they finally found her and brought her home, she was emaciated and had stumps for teeth.
"For years, we weren't supposed to talk about such things," said McDonnell. "But now we've got to acknowledge the damage done to so many women. I am not Catholic-bashing. I still go to church. The church does some good work. But I just don't understand this thing. I want someone to explain it to me."
The church is still groping for a response. The archbishop of Dublin refused to comment last month, as he has all along. Some priests complained of a "vendetta" against the church.
Others, like Sister Angela Fahy of High Park, argued that the church's past treatment of these women "was the way of that time."
"With hindsight," she said, "it would have been very nice to have done it differently."
Another nun, Sister Meta Reid, offered a personal opinion: "Society didn't want these women. Their families didn't want them. There was no place else for them to go. Yes, we were unjust, but we were unwittingly facilitating a system that was unjust." However, "if [we] are to be seen as credible, we need to consider acknowledging our participation in injustice and apologizing for it."
The flap is the talk of the pubs. In Dublin's oldest saloon, where the drinkers flick their cigarette ashes on the lime-green carpet with nary a glance, John Brophy said he was speaking as a former Catholic seminarian:
"All the archbishop had to say was, `OK, these women were real, they came from somewhere. So it's High Mass in the cathedral at 3 o'clock Saturday, and we'll get the choir.' He'd have gotten people to church who hadn't been there in 10 years. But communication isn't part of church culture."
In another pub, Nicole Rourke spoke about her own brush with the Magdalens. A young actress, she recently played a laundress on stage. The play was written by a former nun who had worked as a supervisor in one of the last Magdalen laundries. The masses don't go to the theater, but the play did pierce the climate of silence.
Rourke said, however, that it's too easy to just blame the church. Invoking her own childhood, she said that people knew about the Magdalens all along - but had pretended otherwise.
"The Irish like to shove things under the carpet," Rourke said. "You know the saying `ignorance is bliss'?"
Back at the cemetery, Kathleen Maher sat beside a bishop's tomb and said, "People wanted the `undesirables' to be out of sight and mind. I wanted so much to know why I was being rejected. But we weren't allowed to speak about it to the sisters. We were just expected to wash all their personal towels. See, in their eyes, we were already `dirty,' and they wanted to remain pure."
Everywhere, it seems, little secrets are spilling out.
"It feels great, talking about this," said Margo Kelly, a landscaper who doesn't even know if her mother is alive. The last time she was seen was in 1969. No birth or death certificate is on file in any public office - a telltale sign, Kelly said, that her mother vanished into the Magdalen system.
Four years ago, Kelly went back to the rural convent laundry where her mother was thought to have worked. The building had been leveled. Kelly went looking for the Magdalen graveyard. There were no markings anywhere.
"This is a part of our social history that you can't read about in books," she said. "I'm only one of thousands affected by this. There is a gap in my identity that has not been filled. It's like, if I saw a big jigsaw puzzle of myself, there'd still be a big chunk of it missing."
By contrast, Marion Meehan always knew where her "Granny" was, right until she died in 1983. Granny lived up the road at the High Park Convent for 50 years. The family, all working-class Dubliners, didn't mind it. They even brought her lemonade every Sunday. What they did mind was what happened after she died.
"The whole lot of us went up," said Meehan, "and we asked for Granny's body, to bury her ourselves. They said no, that she'd been there all her life. That was it. We didn't think we could [appeal]. We were raised to believe nuns."
Then, last month, they heard that all the bodies were going to be cremated. So they went back again. As Meehan recalled, "We knew Granny wouldn't want to be burnt. We told them that if we couldn't get her body, that we'd go to the papers." The threat worked. Granny was the sole High Park Magdalen saved from cremation.
Sister Angela Fahy didn't confirm or deny that account. She simply said, "We were certainly willing to work with anyone." Everyone has a theory about all this reticence. Most think that the church is bracing for a rash of lawsuits. Indeed, Pat McDonnell said that the relatives are now in search of a lawyer.
But, to Kathleen Maher, what matters most is the search for self. As an Irishwoman and a former Magdalen, she sees this as a lifelong process. "We need to know ourselves better - our spirituality, our sexuality," she said. "I want to be part of a church that allows me to be free to be a whole person. Everybody needs that, in order to survive."
by CNB