A young boy is sitting on a landing outside his dormitory.
His pants are wet because during the night this traumatized child could not control his
bladder.
What he needs is a soft, reassuring hand on his shoulder…a hug…to hear some kind words.
Instead, he is ordered by a wicked sister to stop his blasted weeping and adhere to
the strict code of silence.
He is scolded and told that he is a disgusting and dirty little wretch who was rightly abandoned
by his parents.
The sister, someone who has vowed to show mercy to this child, takes out a leather strap
and whips him until blood oozes from his already scarred skin.
The boy is then sent back to his bed and told he won’t be eating for the next 24 hours.
As for a change of clothes...maybe he’ll get that in a day or two.
The scene we just described to you is not an exaggeration, and in fact, much worse things
happened to children who were in the care of a group of Roman Catholic nuns called “The
Sisters of Mercy”.
Abuses such as this went on for decades, and it was only recently that the Sisters admitted
their guilt and agreed to pay out many millions in compensation.
But who were these Sisters of Mercy?
Were they always so ruthless and cruel?
Are they still this brutal?
The foundation was started in Ireland in 1831 with the intention of helping the most needy
in society.
Over many years the Sisters of Mercy spread globally, taking the deprived into their orphanages,
their workhouses, and their boarding schools.
The woman who started the foundation was one Catherine McAuley.
She was what is called a “religious sister”, which is slightly different from being a nun
in that a nun leads a much stricter monistic life.
Sisters take a vow, and they dedicate their lives to the Catholic religion, but they don’t
have to live confined to a type of monastery.
So, back in the day Miss McAuley dedicated her life to teaching poor kids about Catholicism
and the way of the good Lord.
As an adult she inherited quite a lot of money and so she decided that she would build schools
where homeless and destitute women, and poor or parentless children could learn.
So far, so good.
One can’t fault the intentions of McAuley, but charity it seems would turn out to far
from next to godliness.
She got more women together, not just religious women, to help run these schools.
They wore the black and white outfit that you might associate with nuns today
She called this group “The Sisters of Mercy” because mercy was what they were supposed
to be all about.
The people they helped really were at the end of the line.
Many of the kids lived on the streets and many of the women sold their bodies to get
by, had been abandoned, or in some cases, had merely been accused of sleeping with too
many men.
By the time McAuley died in 1841 of tuberculosis there were around 100 Sisters of Mercy working
in ten institutions.
Soon those sisters would spread the word and institutions would open in different countries
around the world.
You can go to their website now and you’ll see the charity calls itself the “Mercy
International Association” and says it is dedicated to “bring mercy to people who
are poor, sick and uneducated.”
These days there are something like 5,500 Sisters of Mercy, as well as hundreds of thousands
of people helping them.
Their present track record doesn’t seem so blemished and steeped in controversy.
So, what went wrong in the past?
McAuley might have had the right idea, but after she died, hell literally broke loose
in those institutions.
We might look at St Vincent's Industrial School in Dublin, Ireland.
Industrial schools were for neglected, orphaned or abandoned kids or women, and as the name
suggests, the people sent to live in them were sent to work, sometimes making Rosary
Beads or working in a laundry in such a fashion that today it would be called illegal child
labor.
The children living there were as young as three and as old at 16.
In the 1900s this school was put under scrutiny for the conditions there, and it was revealed
that some of the sisters and some of the lay teachers were far from merciful people.
The girls and boys that lived there had absolutely no time for leisure.
In fact, leisure was not permitted.
They either worked making beads, worked in a laundry, or they did chores that would leave
them with callouses on their hands.
What happened if they broke the rules?
Well, firstly, there was a strict code of silence at the school.
The kids, while living in large groups, were not supposed to talk to each other, laugh,
or fool around.
This kind of thing was seen as unwholesome.
A commission would reveal that if they weren’t physically beaten, they would often be humiliated
by the nuns and lay workers, which would leave them with mental scars for the rest of their
life.
As you’ll soon see, some of those kids grew up and are presently talking about those physical
and mental scars.
There were many schools for the destitute in Ireland run by the Catholic Church, so
not all were run by the sisters of mercy.
But since poverty was so pervasive, many young boys and girls, and women without much hope
ended up at various schools under different names but belonging to the Catholic religious
order.
They didn’t get away with it, of course.
Many years after these kids faced the horrors of their orphanages or schools or workhouses,
they came out and told the world what had happened to them.
One man at the age of 70 described how his dormitory was full of kids who’d spend the
nights banging their heads against the walls.
He stayed at a place called Nazareth House in Scotland, and he said that the nuns would
beat him regularly, and if they weren’t beating him, they would humiliate other kids
in front of him.
He said the nuns would enter the rooms of the boys in the early hours and if it was
found that they had wet the bed, they’d take the kid out and beat him on the landing.
Such trauma, of course, is one of the reasons for bedwetting.
He said he lost his mother when he was young and after that his sister tried to take care
of him.
This didn’t work out, and he spent most of time skipping school and hanging around
the local shops.
One day he was just picked up off the streets and sent to Nazareth House.
Hundreds of people came out and talked about the regime of violence they had suffered as
children, with some of those people taking the Catholic Church to court for cruel and
inhumane treatment.
Some called the schools and workhouses a “House of Hell”.
Another person who experienced this said all the nuns were committed to was the “destruction
of will”.
Then you had the notorious Magdalene laundries run by certain Catholic orders.
These were where so-called “Fallen Women” were sent to work in brutal conditions.
What was a fallen woman?
Well, perhaps it was a woman who wasn’t living her life as society wanted her to live
her life.
Maybe they had been prostitutes, or maybe they were just promiscuous, or perhaps they
were merely poor and just had nowhere to turn for help.
The laundries were just another kind of industrial school, but the work was grueling and there
was little or not pay for the workers.
The abuses that happened there are similar to what we have already described, in this
case the systematic brutalization of young women.
One former inmate who stayed with the Sisters of Mercy and worked in a laundry explained
how she was stripped naked and beaten regularly.
She said once a “sadistic nun” grabbed her by the hair and swung her around the room.
She said she was starved, locked in cupboards, and not allowed to go to the toilet.
When she was let out of the temporary prison she had to stay in her soiled clothes.
At the age of 12 or 13 she’d had enough and tried to set herself on fire, and although
she didn’t manage to kill herself, she was badly burned.
As she screamed out in pain the nuns told her she would not get to see a doctor and
she was refused any kind of medicinal painkiller.
She was then sent to work at one of the infamous Magdalene laundries where girls stayed in
a cell with a bucket for a toilet.
She once had to spend three days in a solitary confinement padded cell for merely being accused
of stealing a candy.
In that cell there was no bed, no light and no blankets.
This is what she told the New York Times when she was a middle-aged woman:
“It was in the padded cell that it dawned on me that I would be there for life, that
I’d be buried in a mass grave; there were whispers that went around.”
Like many others, she suffered from years of PTSD and anxiety and had constant nightmares
about what happened to her when she was staying with those “merciful” people.
. As for rumors of a mass grave, in 1993 a mass
grave outside one of the laundries was discovered and it contained the remains of 155 people.
This discovery happened when an order called the “Sisters of Our Lady of Charity” lost
money on the stock exchange and had to sell some land.
The discovery led to a massive scandal and soon people who’d worked in those laundries
or anyone who’d been allegedly taken care of by one of the Catholic orders came out
and talked about the abuse they had suffered as children.
Still, some members of the Catholic Church denied any wrongdoing, with two sisters formerly
belonging to the laundries saying, “Apologize for what?
Apologize for providing a service?
We provided a free service for the country.”
The Sisters of Mercy, however, has apologized for any abuses that took place over the decades
and paid out around $140 million in 2009 in compensation to the many victims that came
forward.
Other orders that were made to make payments were the “Christian Brothers” and the
“Daughters of Charity” and the “Sisters of Charity” and the “Daughters of the
Heart of Mary” and the list goes on.
But as we speak, groups of people who say they were abused at the hands of the Sisters
of Mercy and other purported charitable orders are still trying to get some compensation
for what they were out through.
In 2019, a group of women who as children had been shipped from the UK to Australia,
said they still suffered from trauma.
The women said they all had to wear hearing aids, because as kids they were smacked in
the side of the head so often.
One woman said there were 20 nuns where she stayed, and only four of them treated the
girls like human beings.
She said to the media, “In the evening … we had to sit on buckets to use the toilet before
we went to bed, with the nuns standing and older girls standing, just watching us.
That was dreadful, even for a little kid … to sit on a bucket and have an audience.”
None of the kids had toothbrushes and they were allowed only one shower a week, which
is worse than today’s prisons, even the most notorious places in the developed world.
When the girls got their periods, the nuns told them that it was God’s punishment...and
if that was showing mercy, then perhaps those nuns might have picked up a dictionary.
Now you need to watch the, “Most Evil Popes in the History of Mankind.”
Or if you’ve had enough evil then take a look at this instead!