Wednesday, February 06, 2013

The church and the community

The scale of Britain’s reliance on churches to meet social needs is set out in a report showing more than half of Anglican parishes run services such as food banks, homework clubs and even street patrols providing blankets and food to homeless people . More than 6,500 Church of England parishes now provide special services for elderly people, schoolchildren, parents and new immigrants, a study by the Church Urban Fund shows. And eight out of 10 reported that individual parishioners give up their spare time to provide informal help to people struggling with issues such as isolation, family breakdown, drug abuse, domestic violence or spiralling debt. The figures do not include large numbers of projects run by Roman Catholic churches, Methodists and other faiths.

Paul Hackwood, chair of trustees, said: “The recession has led to unemployment and benefit cuts, which are having a really negative effect on people’s lives. It has often left to communities themselves to come together and fill the gap.”

Meanwhile in Ireland more information emerges about the slave-labour laundries of the Catholic church. Ireland’s government was directly involved in sending girls and women to work for nothing in laundries run by Catholic orders. The state gave lucrative laundry contracts to these institutions, without complying with fair wage clauses and in the absence of any compliance with social insurance obligations. The state inspected the laundries under the Factories Acts and, in doing so, oversaw and furthered a system of forced and unpaid labour, in violation of countless legal obligations. The Gardaí pursued and returned girls and women who escaped from the Magdalene institutions and "brought women to the Magdalene laundries on a more ad hoc or informal basis".

Orphans and abused, neglected or unruly children were among more than 10,000 sent to the Magdalen Laundries from 1922 to 1996. Some had committed minor crimes, others were simply homeless or poor. Women with mental or physical disabilities and some people with psychiatric illness also found themselves in the laundries. The youngest was just nine. It was the subject of a 2002 film called The Magdalene Sisters. In June 2011, the United Nations’ Committee on Torture highlighted allegations of "physical, emotional abuses and other ill-treatment" and said it was "gravely concerned" at Ireland’s failure to "protect girls and women who were involuntarily confined."  They were denied contact with the outside world, including their family and friends.

Children’s charity Barnardos said in a statement that the report showed the Irish government had "turned a blind eye to the appalling conditions in which Irish citizens lived, while supporting the religious orders who enslaved them in financial and other ways...These women were treated like slaves and deserve adequate compensation for the work they did."

Justice for the Magdalenes group  said it was time to establish a compensation scheme for those who suffered in this system of exploitation stretching over more than seven decades. This had to include, said the group, "the provision of pensions, lost wages, health and housing services, as well as redress, and that is open to all survivors, putting their welfare at the forefront. Magdalene survivors have waited too long for justice and this should not be now burdened with either a complicated legal process or a closed-door policy of compensation."

Nuns from the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity ran laundries at Drumcondra and Sean MacDermott Street in Dublin, the Sisters of Mercy in Galway and Dun Laoghaire, the Religious Sisters of Charity in Donnybrook, Dublin and Cork, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Limerick, Cork, Waterford and New Ross.

The report said that "it cannot be excluded that … a desire to protect rate-payers from the costs of repeated pregnancies outside marriage may have played a part in some referrals of women to the Magdalen Laundries."

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