Did “Magdalen Sisters” Inspiration Fabricate Stories of Abuse?

(www.RemnantNewspaper.com)  “An author whose memoirs recount a harrowing childhood of torture and rape while working in a Roman Catholic religious order is at the centre of a dispute over the accuracy of her claims,” reports The Telegraph (UK, Sept. 19, 2006).

Kathy O'Beirne's account of her early life, published as Don't Ever Tell in Britain and Kathy's Story in Ireland, became a bestseller with 350,000 copies sold in Ireland and Britain. In the book, O’Beirne claims to have suffered 14 years of forced labor in the Magdalen laundries, a Catholic institution which was originally set up to rehabilitate fallen women. She says that she was beaten by her father and sexually abused by two boys from the age of 5 before being sent away to an institution. She also claims that, at the age of 10, she was repeatedly raped by a priest and whipped by nuns, and later forced to take drugs in a mental institution.

However, O’Beirne’s own family are speaking out about her allegedly factual memoirs. Her older brother John O'Beirne, 51, denied the book's allegations of sadistic abuse by his father, describing the sequence of events outlined by his sister as "a jigsaw puzzle and nothing fits." He said that his father was a loving man, who held down two jobs to provide for his family. "Kathy has hurt a lot of people and it's now time for the truth to be told," he said. Another older brother, Oliver, 52, has stated that, “I read the book and I can’t figure out where she is coming from.” Adding that she did not have a good relationship with her family, he said, “I think she needs help.”

A younger brother, Eamon O'Beirne, 48, said he had "no memory whatsoever of Kathy ever being in a Magdalen laundry." He also denied her assertion that she bore a child after being raped by a male visitor to the laundries. "To my knowledge, she never had a child,” said Eamon O’Beirne, “and my father did not abuse or torture me. The stuff as alleged in this book did not happen in our house."

In addition, several women have come forward to say they lived with Miss O'Beirne in the 1970s in the Sherrard Street Hostel for girls in Dublin. During their time in the hostel, which has not been included in the book, they claim that Miss O'Beirne never mentioned having had a child or of working in a Magdalen laundry. Celine Dempsey, 47, said, "Kathy never spoke of being in a Magdalen laundry. How could she? She was in Sherrard Street."

The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the religious order running the laundry, has denied that Miss O'Beirne stayed in one of their homes or laundries. According to The Times (UK, Sept. 19, 2006), the sisters invited an independent archivist to study their files after nobody could remember Kathy O’Beirne. No record has turned up of her attendance.

Florence Horsman Hogan of the Irish charity “Let Our Voices Emerge,” established by people who spent time in religious institutions and who are now dedicated to defending their careers, told The Times: “By her own admission Kathy has had psychological problems from an early age.” She said that the only record of O’Beirne having been in a Catholic institution was when she spent six weeks in St. Anne’s Industrial School in Dublin in 1967.

Comment: What makes this story especially interesting is that Kathy O'Beirne's alleged “memoirs” of abuse at the hands of priests and nuns was the basis for the 2002 film, The Magdalen Sisters, directed by Peter Mullan. Steven D. Greydanus of the Decent Films Guide made this observation about the film:

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.

Mr. Greydanus also accused the film of  “viciousness, exaggeration, and lack of nuance or moral honesty.” Similarly, Film Journal International claimed that “the only real point of the script is that nuns are venal, priests lechers, and the inmates all innocent victims.”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” goes the old computer axiom – if invalid data is entered into a system, the resulting output will also be invalid. The director of The Magdalen Sisters, Peter Mullan, is a rabid Church-hater. Imagine that. At the Venice Film Festival, where The Magdalen Sisters was awarded the top prize (the “Golden Lion”), Mullan compared the Catholic Church to the Taliban, on the pretext that, “in the context of Ireland in that period, they were doing exactly what the Taliban were doing fifty years later." According to the Decent Films Guide article cited above, “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’."

With all those stony, sterile, subhuman priests and nuns to ooh and ahh over, you can bet Mullan saw a hit before filming started on day one. Let’s face it, nothing gets the popcorn flowing like cartoon villains. Snidely Whiplash, Lex Luthor, Auric Goldfinger, a priest, a nun. Cheer the heroes and boo the villains. If the villains are Catholic – all the better.

Garbage in ... garbage out. It appears that the same axiom applies to Miss O'Beirne's “memoirs.”

Oriana Fallaci Loses Battle With Cancer

On September 15, 2006, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, 77, died in her home town of  Florence after battling cancer for several years.

Fallaci began her career in journalism at age 16 and, in 1954, began a 22-year-long relationship as a special correspondent for what were then two of Italy's biggest weeklies, Epoca and Europeo. In 1968, while covering an anti-government protest in Mexico City, Fallaci, detained with a group of students, was shot three times by soldiers and left for dead.

Fallaci was known for her aggressive interviewing style. In addition to quarreling with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Fallaci tore off a chador (enveloping Islamic robe) during her meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini. After being told by Khomeini that she was not obliged to wear the chador since it was only meant to be worn by “good and proper young women,” Fallaci replied, “Since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid medieval rag right now."

After the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, Fallaci rallied to America’s defense. In a front-page essay in September, 2001, in the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, she wrote: "I don't go around singing 'Our Father' and 'Hail Mary' in front of Mohammad's tomb."

That essay was the basis for her book La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride), a visceral study of the incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world, which sold more than 1 million copies in Italy.

In June of 2006, Oriana Fallaci was put on trial in Bergamo, Italy for the crime of “defaming Islam” in her 2004 book, La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason), in which she described Islam as a “trough of stagnant water ... never purified,” whose goal was “to destroy our soul, our ideas .... to subjugate the West once again.”

The lawsuit against Fallaci was filed by Muslim activist Adel Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, who had earlier made headlines when he filed a complaint which resulted in a court ruling, later overturned, ordering a state-run kindergarten in the town of L’Aquila to remove crucifixes from its classrooms, and throwing a crucifix from his mother’s hospital room out of a window.

According to the Associated Press (Sept. 16, 2006), an Islamic group in Italy has expressed "relief" at Fallaci’s demise. "It's almost impossible to feel pity for somebody like Oriana Fallaci," said Dacia Valent, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Anti-Defamation League.

Comment:    Look what has come in the wake of Pope Benedict’s September 12^th address at the University of Regensburg, during which he quoted a 14^th century text that was unflattering towards Islam.

Seven churches of different denominations are attacked with guns and firebombs in the West Bank and Gaza, Tulkarem and Tubas. The Mujahideen Shura Council proclaims, “We shall break the cross and spill the wine ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome ... (May) God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen.” A Muslim cleric in Somalia, Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, preaches that "whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," and exhorts Muslims to “hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements.” Hours later, an Italian nun working at a children’s hospital in northern Mogadishu, Somalia, is murdered when two gunmen shoot her in the back. A  Pakistani group called Jamaat al-Dawat, which runs schools, colleges and medical clinics, demands the Pope’s resignation and, in a statement addressed to “the pope and all infidels,” declares that “if the West does not change its stance regarding Islam, it will face severe consequences.”

Protesters in Islamabad, Pakistan carry placards reading, "Terrorist, extremist Pope be hanged!" and "Down with Muslims' enemies!" They are addressed by Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior leader of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance, who declares, “If I get hold of the pope, I will hang him.”

But it is the death by cancer of a 77-year-old woman whose only weapon was a typewriter that brings relief to the Islamic Anti-Defamation League of Italy. One can only wonder why.

Out of respect for the West’s Catholic history and tradition, Oriana Fallaci, who had an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, described herself as a “Christian atheist.” While it is a ridiculous contradiction, it is still an interesting indication of bad times when we find an atheist, and not Catholic leaders, displaying the courage to tell it like it is without pandering to meaningless ecumenical sensibilities.

Fallaci criticized Pope John Paul II for what she called his “weakness toward the Islamic world.” What would she have said to Pope Benedict in the wake of the Regensburg retaliations? She might have used the same words she used in an e-mail to Margaret Talbot of The New Yorker (June 5, 2006):

Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.

Sure, many of us have Muslim neighbors and co-workers who are just regular Joes trying to provide for their families. Unfortunately, as regards the rising influence of Islam on the world stage, they are merely passengers. The daily headlines tell us who is in the driver’s seat.

Occult “Jesus” Terrorizes Convent School in India

The Times of India reports (Sept. 12, 2006) that the principal, a dozen staff members and about 250 students from the prestigious Loreto Convent School in Lucknow (the capital city of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India) were privy to a special occult session during which a medium transformed into Christ and blessed them.

At the occult session, the children were exposed to a demonstration of a little-known Chandra Cult which is headquartered in Krishnagar (West Bengal). The cult is headed by Nobo Kumar Mandal, a rickshaw-puller patronized by Father Sebastian Kuzhipala, a Catholic priest based in Murshidabad. Father Sebastian and Sister Monica, the school’s principal, conducted the session at Loreto, during which Nobo Kumar served as the medium to bring “Ishuâ” to “heal and bless” the gathering. Nobo Kumar went around grunting and growling, making hissing sounds while “inducing” Jesus to enter his body.

During the session, a dozen students fainted and a couple needed medical attention. Most girls were either horrified or too shocked to explain the phenomenon. During the ritual, Nobo started shuddering and collapsed. "I thought he was dead and I also passed out," said a student. "It looked like he had a massive heart attack ... we all were so scared," said another student.

Sister Monica admitted that some girls fainted during the “holy experience.” She explained, "It is not unusual to be terrified when the Lord comes before you. Even I was frightened. It is very painful when Jesus enters his body. That is why he was writhing on the ground.”

Four days after the occult session, activists of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), protesting the event, ransacked the Loreto Convent School, braking open the gates, damaging the flowerpots and smashing the glass panes of the chapel and the principal's office. The BJYM is the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (Indian Popular Youth Front), the youth wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, the Indian People's Party, which views itself as a champion of socio-religious cultural values of the country's Hindu majority). The BJP claimed that the school was trying to convert non-Christian children who attend the private institute. "It was a planned move to convert Hindus to Christianity, and we will not tolerate it," said Vijay Pathak, a BJP leader.

Following the incident, secretary of the Association of Catholic Educational Institutions, Father Paul Rodrigues, announced closure of all member schools in Lucknow.

The Catholic Bishop's Conference of India (CBCI)  condemned the vandalism at the Loreto School, saying it was "totally unwarranted." Claiming that events surrounding the occult session were “totally blown out of proportion,” the CBCI stated that the session was organized “in good faith” and was merely “a prayer meeting in the school premises,” even though “a few children fainted due to exhaustion.”

Comment: Addressing the media concerning the occult session, the Loreto School’s community leader, Sister Tressia, said that their intention was the "spiritual and emotional development of children. It was a prayer experience." She added that "they just wanted their students to experience the power of God as the spiritual development would help children."

Even the members of the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India did not seem too concerned over the fact that a rickshaw driver, claiming to “channel” Jesus Christ, was writhing, hissing, grunting and growling in front of 250 teenaged girls.

One of the most profound and informative lessons ever imparted to us by Jesus Christ was couched in terms so mundane that many people perhaps pass over it, seeing therein merely a nice, quaint image. “My sheep hear My voice,” said Our Lord, “and I know them, and they follow Me.” Why did some courageous saints oppose the heresies which swamped the early Church? Why did some brave saints go their cruel deaths rather than succumb to the whims of the Protestant reformers? Why do people in the know continue to oppose the false apparitions of Medjugorje?

My sheep hear My voice. This simple phrase is the fly in any ointment that attempts to substitute spiritual counterfeits for the Truth. A grunting, writhing “Jesus,” whose aspect is so terrifying that young children faint in its presence? In saner times, exorcists would be dispatched and the Vatican would make a formal inquiry into the Loreto School episode.

Actually, there is an episode in the Gospels that might shine some light on the Loreto School event. St. Mark tells us about Jesus’ visit to the country of the Gerasens. There, Our Lord encounters a man possessed of an unclean spirit which calls itself “Legion,” for there were many demons involved in the possession. Jesus casts the demons out of the man and into a nearby herd of swine, after which “the herd with great violence was carried headlong into the sea.”

No doubt, that scene would have been accompanied by grunting, writhing and all manner of growling and squealing. But, of course, such a din would not have issued from the Son of God, but from the demon-possessed swine.

Treasures Recovered From 18th Century Church

According to the Associated Press (Sept. 21, 2006), “archaeologists have uncovered coins, dishes, bullets, Indian jewelry and other remains of an 18th-century Catholic church rectory in suburban St. Louis, said to be one of the oldest in the Midwest.”

The church’s remains were discovered below a half-foot of dirt at Spanish Land Grant Park in Florissant, a suburb of St. Louis which the French settled in the 1760s. The recovered remains include fish bones and fragments from plates, cups, bowls, pipes, wine bottles, bullets, silver coins, Indian jewelry items and coffins. One 18th-century French plate was one foot in diameter, and has to be glued together by archaeologists. It contained green arches.

"There were a lot of different serving dishes found," said Mayor Robert Lowery, whose administration has been a backer of the project. "They are able to discover a lot about the types of foods that were served. There were a lot of soups and broths. ... We are able to now know a lot about our city. This is of great historical value."

The city of Florissant sponsored the archaeological dig as part of the Lewis and Clark celebration. Six archaeologists helped uncover about 10,000 items at the park, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

"The kinds of things they have been finding there are consistent with that time period," said Vergil Noble, archaeologist for National Park Services in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a French colonial settlement expert. "For anything of this era to survive in an urban setting is certainly unusual. Certainly, any physical remains would be quite important for improving our understanding of the settlement of St. Louis."

Archaeologists had difficulty locating remains of the church. They found impressions in the dirt from three posts belonging to the church, said Joe Harl, vice president of the Archaeological Research Center of St. Louis. Built in 1789, St. Ferdinand was one of the first churches in the area. According to historians, French settlers used the log church until 1821, when they built the nearby St. Ferdinand Shrine. After the shrine was built, the old log church was used for rental property or was occupied by priests until it burned down in 1836.