Originally posted, 01 June 11.
For some reason this story seems to have just impacted atheists and others on t’other side of the pond. I’m not going to say much about the subject here, as it’s told in the women’s own words and voices in the video playlist below. Their lives say infinitely more than I could manage in a hundred blog-posts. This was a documentary made in 1997, just one year after these institutions closed for good.
I would like to add one point though, that the documentary wasn’t written to make, yet makes very well between the lines. This is the face that ‘mild’ religion takes when it has a real voice in government. This is no way-out conservative fundy sect, or far-off Islamic theocracy. It’s mainstream, ‘gentle’ western Catholicism. And this is why I believe Irish atheists should be consulted and listened to more, when the subject of the impact of Cathoicism in the third world is discussed. They’ve lived through what the Catholic church does to people when it has power in the land. They know in their very bones.
—Daz
