Madam, – Fr Con McGillicuddy’s blinkered views of the Catholic Church’s legacy in Ireland are inappropriate in the extreme (June 8th), particularly during this week of all weeks when the United Nations Committee Against Torture issued such a strong condemnation of the treatment meted out to women and girls in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries – courtesy of the Catholic Church.
One would think that Fr McGillicuddy might be more aware than most, as he lists his address as Grace Park Road, where High Park Magdalene Laundry was located. At High Park in 1993, 155 women who had died while they were incarcerated in the laundry were exhumed, cremated and reinterred – all in the name of selling off some land to cover financial losses incurred by the nuns on the stockmarket.
An additional 22 bodies were found and death certificates did not exist for at least 58 of the overall number. If this level of disrespect of women who suffered so much in life is not an “evil” act, then I don’t know what is.
Because of the extensive publicity surrounding the Magdalene Laundries this week, we are pleased that more Magdalene survivors and friends of survivors have come forward. The testimonies I have heard during this week alone about the behaviour of nuns in Magdalene Laundries make Peter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters seem like a Disney movie and, most certainly make the word “evil” spring to mind. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I can understand the anger Fr Con McGillicuddy (Letters 8th June) has at the comments of Prof Richard Dawkins on the Catholic church. What I can not understand is that he then makes the association of atheists with death camps, Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, etc.
Does Fr McGillicuddy think that because Hitler was a man and a vegetarian that therefore all men and vegetarians are also to be so associated? Secular means treating all equally, not replacing one theocracy with another. What we need is real debate on the secular issue, not fatuous insults. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – You would do your long-suffering readers a great service by declining to print any further letters that describe atheism as a belief (such as “In other words, the new religion is to be secularism?” from Mary Stewart, June 8th). Unbelief in one thing does not imply belief in another. It is an absence of belief; how many times need this be repeated? You would also be heartily thanked for omitting letters that treat the current debate as having at its heart a question of fact.
If there is a central fact, it is universally conceded to be so far from human comprehension as to show not the slightest blur on the greatest imaginable theo-telescope. The academic debate is one of semantics: how best to express what must remain a mystery.
The current spat is not about semantics, however: the question of the status of religion in the State is an entirely political debate. – Yours, etc,
A chara, – Greg Scanlon describes himself as “a humanist who does not have the faith to believe in someone else’s god”. (June 9th) Judging by his sneering reference to women “getting pregnant (immaculately?)”, he also does not have the knowledge to criticise the beliefs of others. For the umpteenth time, the doctrine of the immaculate conception has nothing to do with becoming pregnant by miraculous means. In these days of Google, no correspondent should still be getting this wrong. – Is mise,