Parallel Lifes

I sat in a friend’s house and we three enjoyed a meal of chicken, rice and vegetables washed down with a bottle of wine and a generous helping of religious prejudice and sectarian bigotry. The incidents being recounted were from my lifetime but not my life. They were occurring in my country but not to me. They left lasting marks of their victims and they are still occurring today.

I live in a European first world country where we like to think we are thoroughly modern and international in our attitudes. In the past 20 years, we have had an influx of foreign European and foreign global immigrants that have given our country a multinational friendly touchy feely appearance. Yet beneath that veneer of modernity, we still struggle to cope with our own religious bigotry that has damaged the country for more than a hundred years.

How can we look at what’s happening in the Middle East between Sunni’s and Shi’ites from any position of superiority when the same sectarian actions still rumble on within our own society?

A friend sips on her wine and recalled how difficult her childhood had been in the 1960s and 1970s in a Dublin where the Catholic Church was closely entwined with the Government and the majority of the population.

As she filled the glasses my other friend chipped in her story of trying to evade the unwritten rules within society that were applied, this time in the Dublin of 1980. She’d always wanted to be a nurse and applied to one of the State hospitals in the city to complete 6 months of training. The hospital was run for the State by a Catholic order of nuns who numbered just a few of the hundreds who actually worked there. The patients were of all religious and cultural persuasions. Your chosen faith, should on the face of it, play no part in whether you were accepted as a trainee nurse in the hospital or not.

On completing the application form my friend omitted her school name and her religion. She felt sure this would be picked up in the initial screening but it wasn’t and she duly joined the course. If you worked on Sundays at the hospital you were given an extra 20 minutes break at 10.00 am so that you could attend mass in the hospital chapel. She took that time off so as not to raise suspicion but it was noticed, over time, that she hadn’t actually attended the religious service. She was summoned to meet with the matron who asked why she hadn’t. “I’m just not very religious Sister” my friend replied. “Come now,” said the Matron, gently, “Is there more to it than that?”

When my friend admitted that she was, in fact, Presbyterian the matron left the room and returned with my friend's course application form and was clearly exasperated to find the blank spaces where key information should have been. “This matter will have to be discussed at the next Board meeting of the Governors” she announced and dismissed the nurse whose only sin had been her religion. Having got on the course through omission rather a lie she was subsequently allowed to stay and complete it. The Matron would be more careful reading the next set of applications that landed on her desk.

Even if no one committed a bigoted act growing up a Protestant in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland in those days was an uncomfortable experience for many. Outside schooling which was split between fee-paying private and free state provided, the children generally played happily across religious lines but many an Ash Wednesday led to my friend and her fellow schoolmates travelling, heads down, on public transport with their hair pulled across their foreheads. The absence of a sooty black ash thumbprint from the priest would mark them out as different and attract abuse. On Sundays, the Presbyterian children attended church and Sunday school but were not allowed out at night. There were instances of verbal abuse being shouted and stones thrown at their homes by passing teenagers heading out for the night.

Corpus Christi
The celebration in days gone past of the Roman Catholic feast of Corpus Christi involved a parade of children, adults and accompanying bands in many local residential areas culminating with a religious service held on the green parks located in those estates. The procession generally started at the church and ended on the green. It probably didn’t occur to most participants that anyone would find its occurrence intimidating or objectionable. It probably didn’t occur to many of us that the estates might contain non-Roman Catholics but in hindsight of course, they did. In my case both of my next door neighbours were Protestant and we lived on a green semi-surrounded by a dozen houses. Nearly half were lived in by Protestants and then there was my best friends Alan, a Jew at number 41.

Did I know that in some houses that day children were held inside by their parents during the hour-long parade and service? No, I didn’t. Their plight simply passed me bye.

Holy Communions
Holy communions and the excitement of that day, the white dresses, handbags, rosary beads and the family celebrations were an occasion that Roman Catholic children looked forward to and the whole family enjoyed. However many Protestant children attending state schools, where religious education was compulsory, found that the only religion discussed was the Roman Catholic version. This was largely due to the handing over of the delivery of education in the new state (by the Free State Government) to the Roman Catholic church in the early 1920s.

One of the results of this decision was that generations of children, of all faiths, sat in religious education classes fixated on the First Holy Communion, a major event in the Roman Catholic calendar for weeks before the actual day arrived, usually around April.

First Confession
But before your First Holy Communion came along your First Confession. It seems strange now to recount it, but I struggled to pull together a list of sins to confess to. I was only 7 so I hadn’t reached the fornication or career criminal stage of life. For my first confession I came up with a few tame sins that I felt sure would incur minimal punishment and yet register with the listening priest as indeed sins. I opened the door and sat on the edge of the seat in the darkened chamber. The priest slid back the curtain and from the darkness of his chamber on the other side of the grill He asked not my name but awaited my confession.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned” I went. “I coveted my brother's silver cowboy cap gun and holster and I answered back to my mother.”

“Is that it?” boomed the voice.

“Yes,” I said. I had no plan B if he sought further sins.

“Three Hail Marie’s and two Our Fathers” came the bored voice on the other side and the curtains were drawn across again.

I stepped out of the booth to see three old women sunk on their knees in prayer waiting their turn. One rose with difficulty and made her way to the confessional. As I knelt to do my penance and recited the words I knew so well my mind wandered to the sins these old ladies may well be confessing to and pondered for the next few minutes on their crimes. I drew a blank. 

Today, 52 years later I wondered again at what, in the name of God, this good elderly church-going, service attending women could have been confessing to?

Mass murder? A white collar crime of several millions? Sexual deviancy? Or maybe something more mundane…..

Theft of cough tablets from the local pharmacy?
Lusting after the local doctor? Talking ill of their young loud neighbours?

The people who actually committed the crimes that would have brightened up Father Murphy’s confessional would never have crossed his path. They don’t go to church or frequent confessionals. His daily diet of mind-numbingly petty crimes must have driven him to distraction.

However, I digress. Back then, as I said earlier, all children attending state-run schools were, en masse, educated in the Roman Catholic way. Many of the Protestant girls & boys felt they were missing out on Holy Communion and some of their parents actually bought them white dresses and held parties to appease their youngsters. The desire to fit in and be part of the community seemed a strong then as now.

My nursing friend said her brother emigrated in the 1980s to London, England and said he believed he was suffocated in Ireland by the unhealthy closeness of church and state and the bigotry that continued to exist in everyday life in the Republic.

Ireland in recent years is indulging in a fit of revisiting the evil practices of past generations and it becomes clear that the unhealthy closeness of state and one religion has led to acts of horrible inhumanity on some of our fellow Irish people by, what we can at best call, misguided Irish people. The 1900–1980s contained a catalogue of institutional child and women abuse. I list a few examples below which have shamed our nation and damaged so many lives. Institutions set up with the aim to help the poor and unfortunate ended up destroying the very people they hoped to help.

The Magdalen Laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fibre of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film “The Magdalene Sisters.” http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01180

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home,[1] or simply The Home, was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children that operated between 1925 and 1961 in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. It was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns. Thousands of unwed pregnant women were sent there to give birth. Some of the poorer women were afterwards forced to work without pay, in reimbursement for some of the services rendered. Their children were separated from them and cared for by the nuns until they could be adopted. Over 2,000 children were removed and shipped to America by the religious orders where they were adopted.

In 2012, local historian Catherine Corless published an article documenting the deaths of 796 babies and toddlers at the Home during its years of operation. Her research led her to conclude that almost all had been buried in an unmarked and unregistered mass grave at the Home, some of them in a septic tank.[3] In 1975, two local boys had found a chamber filled with children’s skeletons on the site.[3][4][5] Some local people speculated it was a grave for Famine victims or un-baptised babies.[6]

Numerous news reports alleging the existence of a mass grave containing 800 babies in the septic tank were published – first by one Irish print media outlet and later by international media outlets in late May–early June 2014. The Associated Press has since criticised the reporting of the case, saying it “offers a study in how exaggeration can multiply in the news media”.[7] The story sparked outrage in Ireland and internationally, and the Irish government came under pressure to launch an investigation.[8][9][10] The government called the allegations “deeply disturbing”;[5][11] shortly thereafter, the government and police began a preliminary investigation with the aim of launching an inquiry. Some sources eventually began questioning the story. Corless told the Irish Times “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank.”[3] Dr. Maurice Gueret said his own research into the Home indicated that the death rate at the Bon Secours home was not unusual for that era: “It was no secret that many children died young, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.”[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home

SYMPHYSIOTOMY is a cruel and dangerous childbirth operation that unhinges the pelvis, severing the symphysis joint or, in the case of pubiotomy, sundering the pubic bones.
Ireland was the only country in the developed world to practice this discarded surgery in the mid to late 20th century.

The caesarean section had been the standard treatment for difficult births in Ireland since the end of the 1930s. However, doctors’ preference for symphysiotomy saw 1,500 of these 18th-century operations being performed from 1944 onwards, mostly in Catholic private hospitals. Around 150 women survive today, many of them permanently disabled, incontinent and in pain. One baby in ten died during the process and a number were brain damaged.

Women were occasionally informed their pelvis would be broken, but most were not.

Beyond those specific examples above Ireland was until fairly recently a difficult place for women and non-conformists to live. We’d like to think things are better now but maybe in 50 years time we will be revisited by future generations and found to have fallen short on basic standards of respect of human rights and freedom of religious and lifestyle choices. Only time will tell and we, who are living through now often walk blindly about, not seeing the wrongs around us.