The Magdalene Sisters Controversy
By Steven D. Greydanus
The Magdalene Sisters Controversy Revisited (2010)
Not long ago the Washington Post printed a scathing op-ed by the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s March 2010 pastoral letter of sorrow and remorse over abuse of minors in Church-run Irish institutions such as the Magdalene asylums for girls and similar institutions for boys.
O’Connor, who infamously tore up a photograph of the previous pope on “Saturday Night Live” and was later “ordained” by the “Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church,” said in 2005 that she wanted to help “rescue God from religion,” although in her WaPo editorial she expresses some openness to being reconciled to the Church. The editorial, which blends legitimate outrage with perpetuation of widespread misreportage wrongly attempting to implicate the Vatican and Cardinal Ratzinger in cover-ups of abuse, is most notable here for O’Connor’s autobiographical comments about her own time as a youth in the Magdalene laundries:
When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.
Although O’Connor reports no abuse, her comment that “one of the nuns, at least, was kind” surely suggests that many were not. O’Connor’s experiences may not have been as horrific as the stories dramatized in The Magdalene Sisters, but she may well have little reason to remember the time fondly.
Little reason, but not no reason. O’Connor does note one nun who was not only kind, but gave her her first guitar — setting her on the path, perhaps, to her future career. In five short sentences describing her time at the Magdalene asylums, O’Connor gave one sentence — fifteen words out of less than fifty — to a memory of positive treatment.
Similar memories of not unmixed treatment have been reported by the survivors of abuse whose testimony was documented in the 2009 findings of the Ryan Commission or Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. The Ryan report documents in damning detail the culture of physical and emotional abuse endemic in Irish institutions for children, including reformatory institutions for both boys and girls.
The Ryan report confirms the substantial truth of the sort of stories dramatized in The Magdalene Sisters. These stories need to be told. But the report also reconfirms my fundamental objection to the way that The Magdalene Sisters tells its story, depicting the world of the asylums solely in terms of unremitting abuse, cruelty and sadism unbroken by any hint of kindness or humane treatment. This is not in accordance with the memories of those who endured the Irish institutions, according to the Ryan report (emphasis in original):
Many witnesses who complained of abuse nevertheless expressed some positive memories: small gestures of kindness were vividly recalled. A word of consideration or encouragement, or an act of sympathy or understanding had a profound effect. Adults in their sixties and seventies recalled seemingly insignificant events that had remained with them all their lives. …
Among the positive experiences reported by witnesses was the kindness of some religious and lay staff in the schools and institutions, including a number who provided support in times of difficulty after they were discharged. Many emphasised the enormous difference that just a kind word or gesture made to their daily lives.
Chapter 10 of the report, among other areas, deals with such positive memories. It includes such comments as these:
One very, very kind person, she was Sr …X… she was old, a lovely person. I have great memories of her. She would come in to call us, open up the curtains and she would be singing in the morning. She was lovely to us, she wasn’t long there. …
One nun she was absolutely lovely, I am a nurse today because of her, she was the nun in the infirmary, she would get you something and say “don’t say a word”.
It should be noted that not all such reports of kindness are reliable, just as not all reports of abuse are reliable. Where abuse is the norm, a mere cessation of abuse may be perceived as “kindness” — and the Ryan report does document instances of such positively remembered non-cruelty. In other cases, a child suffering in an abusive environment may invent or exaggerate moments of kindness as a coping mechanism. The will to believe, even decades later, that the experience wasn’t all bad — perhaps in some cases out of piety for the Church, or a kind of Stockholm identification with one’s tormentors — may be a factor in some reports of positive memories.
Still, it would be perverse to dismiss these positive memories altogether, just as it would be perverse to dismiss memories of abuse altogether just because not all reports of abuse are reliable. Indeed, these positive memories add to rather than detract from the credibility and the horror of the memories of abuse. If the report found only uniformly bad memories of consistently abusive treatment unmixed with any kind or humane treatment whatsoever, one would be forced to posit that the books had been cooked. Human nature is too complex for morally unmixed behavior, either good or bad, especially across a social spectrum.
Even in the worst depravities that the modern world has come up with, one finds signs of humanity, acts of conscience and compassion. Even in the Nazi terror and the Holocaust, Nazi officers and soldiers, Party members and other German citizens were not uniformly evil all the time. Films that deal with Nazism and the Holocaust are most persuasive when they acknowledge this (e.g., Polanski’s The Pianist, with its sympathetic portrait of one Nazi officer).
Such glimpses of humanity hardly falsify or mitigate the horror. On the contrary, in a way they confirm and accentuate it. Partly because they render the totality more real, more plausible, and partly because they confront us with the sickening reality that these horrors were perpetrated not by monsters or demons, but by human beings not unlike ourselves. Practical moral action, steps toward redress, reform and reconciliation, begin with this recognition.
This, as I see it, is what The Magdalene Sisters gets crucially wrong. Mullan cooks the books; he reports only evil behavior that supports his case, ironically undermining the credibility of his case. Mullan’s nuns are simply evildoers who do evil; we are never invited to see them as persons in any way like ourselves. It is us/them thinking: Evil is what “they” do; “they” are not like “us.”
Mullan never asks “How could this happen? How could people — people not unlike ourselves — do these things?” Writing by his own admission in “white-hot rage,” and likely not uninfluenced by his acknowledged contempt for religion in general and Catholicism in particular, Mullan created a tableau of stereotyped villains in black wimples instead of black hats, compromising the persuasiveness and honesty of his critique — partly, to be sure, out of legitimate desire to vindicate the victims and indict the guilty.
Do I see it this way only because I am a devout Catholic? I don’t think so. Although critical genuflection to the film was widespread, many critics saw the same issues I did. For example, Scott Tobias (A.V. Club) referred to the “sinister, money-grubbing Mother Superior (played with lip-smacking relish by Geraldine McEwan)” and went on to write:
The Magdalene Sisters reserves all of its empathy for the inmates … But the film might have been more powerful, not to mention fair, if the nuns believed they were doing right; only on movie night, when McEwan sees herself in Ingrid Bergman in The Bells Of St. Mary’s, does Mullan grant her so much as the delusion of rectitude. Other touches are simply inexcusable … A brawler who doesn’t know when to pull his punches, Mullan throws one haymaker after another, his unforgiving swipes aligning him closer to Mother Superior than he’d care to admit.
Ed Gonzalez (Slant), no friend of the Church but an insightful writer I have long admired, wrote:
Shipped away by their families to the Magdalene laundry house, the girls are dutifully tortured and humiliated by a group of nuns overseen by the hideous Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan, giving Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched a run for her money). … Mullan reduces Sister Bridget to a blubbering mess when she can’t find the key to the safe that guards her money, condescendingly implying that the thrill of commerce is enough to explain how devils are made of saints. Two scenes stand apart from the pack: the vain Sister Bridget crying during a screening of Leo McCarey’s humanist masterpiece The Bells of St. Mary’s and Margaret choosing not to escape from her prison through a garden door accidentally left ajar. These are Mullan’s only attempts at trying to understand the thorny seduction of Catholicism. Otherwise, Sister Bridget and her ilk come close to resembling cartoons, with the violence they wield so numbing it borders on the histrionic. There’s no discernable structure to this facile, episodic torture mechanism yet Mullan hopes that you’ll approach the film as a work of activism.
This doesn’t mean that The Magdalene Sisters has no value, or that no good could come or has come from it. There is still exposé of social sin here, and good may come of it in spite of serious flaws. I’ve often said that nothing is more likely to secure my distrust of a film than a complete lack of empathy for an entire group of people or class of characters. Mullan’s lack of empathy for the nuns compromises, though it doesn’t entirely negate, the value of the film’s empathy for the victims, who have the greater claim. It’s a claim that would have been better served by more honest art, by something better than prejudicial anti-religious stereotyping. Mullan’s decisions are understandable; that doesn’t make them less problematic.
The Magdalene Sisters Controversy (2004)
The first question that arises in response to The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s controversial, critically acclaimed film about Irish penitential asylums for wayward girls and women, is: Did these horrors really happen?
Did the Magdalene asylums, originally established in the nineteenth century by the Sisters of Mercy as spiritual refuges for prostitutes and other women penitents, go on to hold girls and even grown women against their will, for disgraces ranging from extramarital pregnancy to mere flirting or even having been raped?
Did some women grow old and die working in the infamous Magdalene laundries, not necessarily out of personal conviction or desire for a vocation to lifelong penance, but more or less because the doors were locked?
Were girls brutally beaten for inadvertent or minor offenses, stripped naked and mocked by sadistic nuns over the sizes of their various body parts, abused in other ways?
Tragically, it seems that there may indeed be truth to these charges. While The Magdalene Sisters is a work of fiction, the abuses it depicts are allegedly based on credible survivor accounts of life in the Magdalene institutions, which are said to have taken in as many as 30,000 women between their inception in the 1880s and their final closing in 1996. In fact, there are reports that, according to some survivors, the abuses depicted in The Magdalene Sisters actually fall short of the worst that really happened, and the director himself has commented that he refrained from recreating the most terrible reported incidents for fear of overwhelming and alienating the audience.
In the wake of publicity and controversy surrounding the film — which took home the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and was strongly criticized in a review in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano — the American wing of the Sisters of Mercy issued a statement acknowledging that the Magdalene institutions represent “a time in the history of the Catholic Church and religious orders of which we are not proud,” and apologizing for “anyone who may have been abused at the hands of our sisters, or any sisters.” (Media reports that the film was “condemned by the Vatican” are incorrect; a film review in L’Osservatore Romano doesn’t amount to the Vatican taking a stand on a film.)
A second question that arises is: How could this have happened? Is the truth simply that the nuns who ran the Magdalene asylums were monsters of cruelty? How could they have imagined themselves to be serving God while committing such blatantly unchristian acts as ritual humiliation of naked girls? For that matter, how could parents so easily have handed over daughters who in some cases had done nothing wrong? How could the state have permitted adult women to be held under lock and key without process of law?
To lay the entire blame at the feet of the nuns and priests involved is unsatisfying and unpersuasive. Certainly there have been abusive nuns and priests guilty of misusing their authority over the vulnerable — just as there are bad teachers, bosses, doctors, police officers, military personnel, and politicians guilty of doing the same. Even so, most teachers, bosses, and other authority figures get by without committing such flagrant abuses; and so do most nuns and priests.
The Sisters of Mercy who ran the Magdalene institutions were probably pretty much like anybody else, with some bad apples, some good ones, and most somewhere in the middle. This, indeed, is part of the horror: How could people who might perhaps turn out to be fairly human if you got to know them participate in something of this enormity?
Perhaps the Magdalene asylums were affected by some kind of cultural pathology, some institutionalized or social sin, that fostered especially cruel behavior. If so, it was a pathology not specific to the Catholic Church, but was shared by other Irish churches (which ran similar institutions of their own) as well as by society at large and the state. (At the time that the Magdalene asylums began, Catholicism had only recently come out of centuries of persecution, and the Irish populace had been able to publicly practice their faith for little more than a generation; so attempts to blame the pathologies of society and the state entirely on the Church would seem to be unpersuasive.)
But The Magdalene Sisters isn’t interested in exploring the pathologies of the culture or the psychology of the oppressors. The film offers no insights into its villains, the nuns, priests, and parents; it has no interest in what they were thinking, how they could have rationalized their actions in their own minds. When the parents of the young rape victim (Anne-Marie Duff) bundle her off to the laundries, when a nun reduces a girl to tears by sadistic mockery, we learn absolutely nothing about what these people thought about what they were doing, why they felt that such actions were justifiable and appropriate.
Instead, the film simply presents its nuns, priests, and parents as cruel, judgmental, and evil — end of story. Its sole interest in them is insofar as they are responsible for the unjust suffering of the girls.
Nobody likes to see representatives of their own group demonized or dehumanized on the screen. Stereotyped depictions of villainous bucktoothed Japanese, fanatical Arab terrorists, brutal military men, menacing urban blacks, hate-filled intolerant Christians, and similar negative portrayals of other groups have all been the subjects of protest and outcry.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with making a movie about bad apples. A movie about corrupt cops isn’t necessarily obliged to depict a representative number of good cops, or to sermonize about how many good cops there are in the world.
Yet suppose that someone were to make a serious film called LAPD that depicted exclusively vicious, lawless cops relentlessly brutalizing individuals who were always either wholly innocent victims or else guilty of nothing more serious than jaywalking. Suppose, further, that the director of the film, in interviews, compared the real-life LAPD to the Taliban, and that he himself was a bitter ex-cop and anti-establishment anarchist who considered the whole concept of criminal and penal law absurd. Even if the individual episodes in the film may have been based in fact, would there be any serious question that the film was pernicious anti-cop propaganda?
Peter Mullan was raised Catholic but in interviews has stated that he has considered himself a Marxist from his teenaged years, and has described belief in heaven and hell as “nonsense” and “the whole notion of celibacy” as “nuts” and “perverse.” Additionally, he has drawn an incendiary analogy between the nuns who ran the Magdalene asylums and the Taliban, presumably in connection with how each treated the women under their control (remarks that apparently were misquoted and misrepresented, especially on the Internet, as broadly equating the Taliban and the Catholic Church).
Mullan claims that his film isn’t meant to be anti-Catholic, but is meant to expose the victimization of young women by a certain phenomenon in the Church. Nevertheless, he freely acknowledges his animosity toward his Catholic upbringing, and admits that he brought his prejudices and sympathies to this project.
Perhaps he didn’t consciously set out to make an anti-Catholic film. D. W. Griffith didn’t set out to make a racist film, but it doesn’t make Birth of a Nation any less racist.
Jewish activist groups have been vocally protesting Mel Gibson’s upcoming The Passion over how it will portray first-century Jewish leaders, which they fear will lead to anti-semitic sentiment. Yet that film will at least have some positive depictions of Jewish leaders — for example, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both members of the Sanhedrin.
By contrast, Mullan’s black-and-white (or rather black and more black) depiction of clergy and religious is absolute: Not a single character in a wimple or a Roman collar ever manifests even the slightest shred of kindness, compassion, human decency, or genuine spirituality; not one has the briefest instant of guilt, regret or inner conflict over the energetic, sometimes cheerfully brutal sadism and abuse that pervades the film.
The closest Mullan comes to humanizing his ecclesiastical figures are brief moments of aesthetic enjoyment or artistic expression. The film opens with a handsome young priest passionately playing a bodhrán and singing a traditional folk song at a wedding reception; minutes later, he’s complicit in the institutionalizing of one of the film’s protagonists, the young rape victim. Later, Sr. Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), the sadistic nun in charge of the asylum — whom even favorable reviews routinely compare with the infamous Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — smilingly confesses a lifelong love of cinema.
Such glimpses of something other than mere sadism notwithstanding, decency and compassion are entirely absent. If this doesn’t qualify as anti-Catholic, what would?
Whatever value the film might have had as an exposé of social sin is undermined, not enhanced, by its prejudicial stereotyping of every individual nun and priest. Instead of being a morally serious film about a corrupt institution in a flawed society, The Magdalene Sisters becomes mere agitprop about how evil and terrible Irish Catholic nuns, priests, and parents are.
Thus, for example, Valerio Riva, a member of the administrative board of the arts council that runs the Venice Film Festival, protested the festival’s top award going to what he called “an incorrect propaganda film,” even going so far as to say that “the director is comparable to [Nazi propagandist] Leni Riefenstahl.”
It’s important to note that not all films critical of Catholic clergy or religious are guilty of this sort of thing. The 1995 Vatican film list includes such hierarchy-indicting titles as The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Mission, and Andrei Rublev. (Somehow I can’t imagine many other groups officially recognizing films similarly depicting their leadership in such critical terms.)
That the Magdalene asylums represent a phenomenon as deserving of critical scrutiny as the trial of Joan of Arc or the ecclesiastical abandonment of the Guaraní missions, I don’t question. Mullan, however, betrays his subject with smug Catholic-bashing. It’s a tragedy that the enormity of what went wrong at the Magdalene asylums has been trivialized by cheap manipulation.