'A harrowing new film exposes what happens when groups degrade human beings in the name of a higher good." These words begin a review by Sister Joan Chittister, an American Benedictine, of The Magdalene Sisters. She believes it is the key message of the film, writes Breda O'Brien.
Not that she shrinks from the other messages. She excoriates a culture that sent women away to the laundries for "being pregnant out of wedlock, for being independent, for being flirtatious".
She grieves that women in religious life could ever have seen presiding over these laundries as the right thing to do. Yet she insists that it is not just the unmasking of the horror of these institutions which is at stake here, important as that is. "What is at stake is the challenge to look at what happens anyone who degrades another human being in the name of doing a good thing."
On Tuesday and Wednesday last, Liveline, a flagship programme of our national public service broadcaster, relayed over the national airwaves the life of a woman named Margaret who was a so-called Magdalene. The programme had been contacted by a friend of Margaret who had been an orphan in High Park Orphanage. This woman was "livid" that Margaret had been buried in a "mass grave" and that she had not been given her own grave and headstone.
She went on to make inaccurate allegations about the funeral, such as that no words were spoken about Margaret, and that she received a pauper's grave.
In fact, Margaret had a carefully prepared funeral service concelebrated by three priests, where a priest who knew her well spoke about her. There was singing in the church and at the graveside, a Mass booklet with her name on it and refreshments served afterwards to those who attended. Margaret was indeed buried in a communal grave, but one with no reference to Magdalenes or penitents. Nuns are also buried in communal graves, but "mass grave" summons up images of Bosnian massacres or concentration-camp victims.
The first caller revealed that Margaret had given birth outside wedlock. A second woman came on to speak about Margaret. She ended up speaking about the nuns in High Park. She referred to them as the "devil's disciples".
She alleged that they had wrapped dead babies in sheets and flung them into mass graves.(The nuns say that High Park was never a mother-and-baby home, nor were babies born or buried there.)
She spoke about nuns living in luxury in "a nursing home fit for royalty". She was unaware that this same nursing home was where Margaret had been cared for during her last illness, until her removal to the Mater.
My quarrel is not with these or other callers to the programme, who were speaking the truth as they saw it, and some of whom have been wounded in the past. My quarrel is with RTÉ. It produced a programme with no balancing voices who could set the record straight. In the process, it did something unpardonable. One of Margaret's twin daughters heard of her mother's death on Liveline.
This was a programme which was pillorying, in their absence, the nuns of High Park for alleged neglect and cruelty.
What kind of cruelty is it to be responsible for someone hearing of her birth mother's death in the context of a programme which was painting a completely inaccurate picture of her mother's last months and of her mother's funeral?
No doubt it will be said that this only happened because the nuns failed to contact the daughters regarding their mother's death, although other family members who were in regular contact with Margaret were present.
The nuns say they rang the only contact number they had for two days, and that they then asked gardaí to call to the house. They go on: "Despite our efforts to contact this part of this woman's family we regret very much that contact had not been made. We believed it had been."
What have Liveline to say about contacting her family? "RTÉ endeavoured to make contact with family members of the recently deceased person but were unable to do so. Relatives who did phone in on Wednesday were dealt with in a sensitive manner."
Liveline expects us to accept that it acted in good faith even though it broadcast allegations, despite failure to contact any family. Yet no such acceptance of good faith was extended to the nuns of High Park. Nor will it be, because they are nuns, and nuns are fair game.
Liveline rang High Park three-quarters of an hour before Tuesday's programme and left a message with a housekeeper. It admits that it only made direct contact with the nuns on Wednesday, when it offered the sisters an opportunity to appear on Joe Duffy's programme, after a day of condemnation and inaccuracies. No one could redress the damage done by that stage, including to the staff who nursed Margaret through her last painful illness.
Other members of Margaret's family are devastated that this very private woman's life was bandied about on the airwaves, revealing details which even some family members had never been told by Margaret herself. The sisters have decided to speak out, but not for themselves. They say: "Criticising sisters and broadcasting allegations about sisters that have not been proven at any forum is now the norm. This has become part of our daily lives.
"We have only decided to speak on this issue because a woman whom we know valued her privacy had her name and intimate details about her life broadcast to the nation on Tuesday. If this is OK with the Irish media then perhaps we will have to live with this as well."
The Magdalen laundries were appalling institutions, where women were dumped by families, and nuns should have had no part in facilitating that.
Yet sincere attempts to make reparation are ignored by the media, while every unproven allegation against members of religious congregations is treated like substantiated fact.
Is abandoning justice in the case of certain groups of human beings to be the new norm? If so, then we will see many more people, including, as in this case, the deceased and the bereaved, being degraded in the name of doing a good thing.