FILMS: Philomena and The Magdalene Sisters

Oh, the Catholic Church in real time, in real life.
I thought I had resolved my issues with the Church by attending a High Anglican parish and becoming a "Zen-glican". 
That was before the astonishing child molestations and the Irish Magdalene  revelations.

Both of these films are based on true stories of institutional malevolent cruelty.   

Over 30,000 pregnant girls were sent to the Magdalene Sisters Laundries in Ireland, where they were work slaves: legally abused, dishonored, and punished. 

In "Philomena", a now aged mother searches for her son. He was "sold" to an American couple from the orphanage maintained on site when he was about four. She and the other unwed mothers were allowed to see their children for a few minutes a day and so the loss was wrenching. He's taken away without even a goodbye embrace. 

With the help of a journalist, she finds that he died of AIDS, and that he was buried in the cemetery of the workhouse she lived in.

Mother and son had searched for each other over the years, inquiring of the nuns at the laundry whether there was any information more than once. Both were told that each was dead. The records were burned in a convenient fire. 

In "The Magdalene Sisters", four young women are sent to the laundry for sexual activity. One already lived in an Catholic orphanage and was placed there because she lingered to speak to a group of boys in the yard one day.

Another was "simple", what we'd call a special needs child, and probably didn't understand what happened to her.  

Another is raped; the neighbors whisper, and she is sent away by her parents and priest while the young man goes free. 

The last is disowned forever by her parents and banished to the sisters' care. Her own mother won't even look at her new little son or speak to her after the childbirth. She is forcibly restrained by her father when she changes her mind about the adoption, the baby taken away from her forever as she screams for help. 

The Mother Superior is a sadistic monster in both films, as are most of the nuns. All their rightful erotic energy has been shaped into a community of aggressive, righteous, greedy, vengeful Lord-of-the-Flies/The Lottery creatures.  

Their evil power is fed by  sustained cruelty to the innocent young sexual transgressors they seek to redeem, in Jesus' name amen.

A particularly poignant and ironic moment is when the young laundresses and nuns view a special Christmas treat, the beautiful film "The Bells of St. Mary's."  Ingrid Bergman's saintly nun's face illumines the screen, and Mother Superior's face reveals her own identification with the perfect Sister Benedict, dying in perfect grace. 

Mother Superior's self-beatification is both evil and innocent. Her examination of conscience before confession would determine no sin in her. Her own moral sensibility is lost, a kind of mental rape performed by Catholic socialization and culture.

Two of the young women escape and are able to make new lives.  One remains in an insane asylum for life, and the last is removed from the laundry when her younger brother comes of age and comes to take her home. Each story's goodbye is a kind of terrible Cinderella-life-ever-after parody.

The issues raised for me by the Church's multiple moral culpabilities are so deep and personal that I probably won't ever get over them. 

Were my schoolmates at St. Mary's ever molested by Father Mulligan?  He used to hug me too hard. Or cute young Father Rourke, his brogue so thick we struggled to understand his daily sermons.

Sister Alcantra hit the kids on the knuckles with rulers, and I was petrified of her every day of first and second grade, watching in horror as the obstreperous farm boys got theirs.  I only got hit once, though.

At 19 in 1965, out of control with painful emotional conflicts and pregnant, I was sent away by my parents to a domestic worker job arranged by Catholic Welfare Services. The baby girl, born April 27, 1966, was placed for adoption and the records sealed.  "No one would know". 

But it's another story, a watered-down American model of what these young women went through, and not nearly so horrible as their experiences.

I think the trauma made me "forget" and dissociate, and the numbness I do feel must be the scars, I hope. I don't want to feel nothing.  I wish I could grieve hard, but that ability has been lost to me.

Even now, as the old prayers were recited by the young women in the film, I found myself praying with them, the words still able to give me spiritual solace, hope, comfort and transcendence.

But surely, a loving God would not subject his creations to such pain and suffering, would He?

No way. I think when my life ends, my consciousness will cease. My soul is not going anyplace, and my remains will go to the wide ocean.

I think the spiritual acts I love to perform are merely classic aesthetic catharsis; I make them in this dystopian and beautiful world because they have their own authentic power for me: to sustain a life of energy and love.