tuambabies.org
  • Home
    • Blackrock College
    • The Pope’s Pedophile >
      • Mother-Baby-Homes Bill 2022
      • Archbishop Diarmuid Martin >
        • HOT NEWS
  • Felix's Blog
    • The Keepers-Maskell's Irish Story
    • Gallery >
      • Tuam's Stolen Orphan Funds
    • Mission Statement
    • Pope Blog >
      • About
      • Around the World
  • Irish Priests
    • Priests Convicted >
      • Bishop Eamonn Casey
      • Country by Country
      • The Paraclete >
        • Christian Brothers >
          • Laundries & Schools >
            • List of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland
            • Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools of Ireland
            • COLLABORATIVE FORUM
            • Sunday’s Well
            • Names Of 800 Babies
          • Merciless Nuns
  • Videos & Books
  • World Reports
    • Technical Report on the Tuam Site
    • Official Reports
    • Final Report on Tuam
    • 3rd Interim Report
    • The Ryan Report
    • Contact >
      • C.A.B.
  • America Priests
  • Vaccines
    • Slavery >
      • Genocide >
        • Wealth
        • Irish Census Reports >
          • TimeLine >
            • Statistics
  • Prolific Irish Pedophile-Priests
    • Poland
  • Pedophilia Classification
  • Reparations
  • Whom is Kidding Who?
  • Press Reports
  • CANADA
  • Crimes/Names of Canadian Clergy

Why were Irish Nuns so Cruel?

28/11/2018

17 Comments

 
 “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley. 

     A few weeks ago at a major meeting in Waterford City at which I was the speaker, I was asked, “Why were Irish Nuns so cruel?”  At the time I didn’t have a ready response, so I answered that I wanted to reflect on the question for some time before I would reply.  Here is my reply.

      I certainly didn’t need any time to reflect on my own experience of cruel Irish Nuns..  After all, I was nine years with the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul in Dublin in both a Mother and Baby Home, St. Patrick’s on the Navan Road where I was born and spent the first four years of my life, and for five more years at St Philomena's Home, Stillorgan. My time with these Nuns was horrendous. I endured all their frustrations directly with violence, beatings, rapes, and mental trauma.  As the result of a rape and beating by a Nun, I spent two years in a coma in hospital hiding from my mangled mind and body. I was five years of age. 

     Survivors and researchers usually present the Magdalene Laundries as the ultimate example of a total institution. The terror so enthusiastically applied by the Religious Nuns who ran the Magdalene Laundries was very real for the Survivors of such Institutions. The rules of the Magdalene Laundries gave the Nuns the absolute authority to punish the inmates who were slave women and children. The Nuns believed they had the right to use violence on them arbitrarily, including, if necessary, killing them. The Nuns carried out their daily tasks of interplay of the inmates bloodily and with great relish, and the slaves everyday experienced these practices through their interactions with the frustrated Nuns.

    Some of the Irish Nuns who ran the Magdalene Laundries had notorious reputations and were known for their extreme violence, even in many cases as we know today, beating the inmates to death.  No doubt there were a few gentler Nuns, but they remained passively silent as they watched the violent Nuns run amok, behaving in a frenzied, out-of-control and unrestrained manner. In the Magdalene Laundries and other Institutions run by the ‘Holy’ Sisters, it was all about the exercise of power. The Nuns were the power and to them the inmates were slaves, criminals and whores. The Nuns’ total exercise of power included the daily use of extreme mental as well as physical violence as they believed that the women and the children were to be broken on the Catherine wheel, so to speak, and destroyed mentally, if possible, by the whims and acrimonious tempers of the sexually frustrated Nuns. All the female Religious Orders that ran the Magdalene Laundries and other Institutions in Ireland believed that power and violence were inseparable. You must remember that Catholic Ireland believed that the Religious-run Institutions were legitimate and acceptable places in which to put unmarried women and their children who were judged as being anti-social and ungodly.

    Most - if not all - of the Irish Nuns were from respectable, rural and middle-class families. It was considered very prestigious to have a daughter become a Nun as was having a son in the Priesthood. It was thought to confer a higher social status for the family and to provide a degree of comfort for unmarried daughters. The girl herself often wished to take the veil to escape the intolerable working conditions on the family farm. Some of these women and girls from middle-class backgrounds and with no professional training, were transformed into some of the most vicious Nuns running various Religious Institutions in Ireland. 

    The innocent novice Nuns, with their good intentions, had no idea of what awaited them in the hellholes known as the Magdalene Laundries with their captive and illegally-held female slaves and their children who, although they had committed no crime, toiled there.  Later in life, all the Nuns were exhausted with the monotonous work and the intolerable religious life in the convents attached to the Magdalene Laundries or other institutions to which they were assigned.

    In truth most of the young Nuns were not yet expert in administering human suffering; they were to become that later. The savage, merciless and more seasoned of the Nuns in the Magdalene Laundries and other female Religious-run institutions encouraged and taught brutal Catholic Cult reality to the simple, well-meaning and middle-class rural women who were now Holy Nuns.  Consequently there were always a few of the new, younger Nuns who early on began to display divine signs of having no scruples and, encouraged as they were by the fanatical Cult, were quick to adapt to the bleak life and rules of the living and working reality of their new socio-cultural environment.

    The novice Nuns watched and learned from the older, more experienced Nuns, so that they too could attain the level of cruelty and depravity they daily saw being committed on the slave women and their fatherless children. It took maybe a week or two to metamorphose the awkward, timid, novice Nuns into the new, confident and vicious Nuns so demonstrably capable of using verbal and physical violence on their captive slave women and their children illegally detained in the religious prisons known as the Magdalene Laundries and other institutions. 

    The religious habit was a distinctive set of clothing worn by members of a religious Order with the style and colour differentiating each Order. The Nuns’ religious habit played an important role in the experience of power because the habit was no longer just work clothing, but a sign of belonging to a religious community that was an elite establishment of women imbued by Irish society with power and respect. The proud wearing of the religious habit was a profound experience for the middle-class women, and the uniformity contributed to forging an esprit de corps, a feeling of pride and mutual loyalty even though it did not exclude hierarchies of rank and did not preclude friction within the group. 

    The Nuns enjoyed certain privileges both in Irish society as a whole and in their palatial Convents where the daily tasks of cooking, cleaning, washing-up, ironing etc, were all performed by their slaves. The extravagant Convents offered the Nuns a degree of gentile comfort, a warm room of their own, the best of food and drink, and wanting for nothing. No Nun ever died of hunger, yet hundreds - if not thousands -  of the enslaved women and children in their care died from hunger and cold.

    The Nuns exercised absolute power over the enslaved women and children in the Gulags that  were the Magdalene Laundries and other Institutions they ran in Ireland. Violence was frequently employed and encouraged with the most common forms being verbal abuse, slaps, blows, and kicks. For the enslaved women and children, the Magdalene Laundries were places of constant suffering and death through hunger, brutal violence, epidemics and systematic mass-murder. 

    Some thuggish Nuns who worked in the Magdalene Laundries and other Institutions were notorious for hitting the enslaved women and children for no reason, even beating some to death. A few Nuns kicked women and children down the stairs and then took the opportunity to kick them as they lay injured or struggling to stand or crawl away. Kicking, you see, took the degradation of the victims to a new level. It is a greater act of contempt than striking the face because it emphasises the asymmetry between the torturer and her victim. The victim lies prostrate on the ground, at the Nun’s feet. The impact of a blow is much greater if administered with the foot. It was a known fact among the slave women and children that beating them was a way of compensating for the Nuns’ own incompetence and of imposing  and demonstrating their  authority. Physical violence was allowed and was encouraged by the frustrated Nuns in all the Institutions in order to get the upper hand - literally and brutally - by striking blows with hands, feet, sticks, chains, metal objects or whatever else came to hand.  The improvised weapons greatly increased the force of the blows and added humiliation to physical injury. In some cases the Nuns even used their long heavy-duty wooden rosary beads to beat the slave women or the children. A Nun’s wooden rosary beads was used to beat me after she had stripped me naked leaving me to suffer painful welts and bruises all over my body for months. I was 8 years of age. 

    The Magdalene Laundries were a profitable business for the Nuns and the Cult of the Irish Catholic Church. For the barbarous Nuns who lived there and in other Institutions, they were a great place in which to eat, drink, work and play once you locked the slaves away at night as any competent slave trader and owner would do. The slave trade they operated included the illegal selling of the children of the enslaved women. After all, slavery played a crucial role in the development and ongoing operation of the Cult’s economy. It has enriched the Irish Catholic Church to the extent that, even to this day, it is the wealthiest organisation in Ireland. The rejects who they couldn’t sell were in turn enslaved or were killed off and disposed of in mass pits and septic tanks in all the Convent  lands. Even in death, the ‘Holy’ Nuns administered this final insult by depriving the innocent women and children of Catholic burial rites.

    The exercise of absolute power is crucial for understanding the running of the Religious Institutions in Ireland. Power incites, induces and seduces especially when used or mixed with fear. The Nuns had complete power over the women and children and overwhelming dominance over everything in their Institutions.. The purpose of the daily perpetration of violence against slave women and children of all backgrounds were to dominate, break and destroy them. 

    Some Nuns systematically accelerated and intensified their violent acts in the presence of another Nun, and considered it better still if she was an incoming novice. It was a matter of impressing and/or shocking fellow Nuns by specific acts of violence, and thereby proving one’s authority and skill. 
​

    The Nuns must have realised that the exercise of power over others can never be definitive, as to act with their accustomed violence beyond the walls of their institutions was impossible.  Within them, however, nobody could escape the interlaced structure of these complex power relations. Many Nuns pretended not to see or hear what was going on around them, but instead were passive, taking refuge in their work and silent prayers. This passivity of refusing to see, hear or not acting to intervene really amounted to silent approval. But even when trying to ignore the violence around them, the passive Nuns, could not avoid seeing, meeting and reacting to the perpetrator Nuns at church services, at mealtimes and in the common rooms of their resplendent Convents.  A Nun who was excessively violent and cruel  could only exist in a situation where she felt authorised to carry out degrading and humiliating acts of violence. A passive Nun permitted and regulated the actions of the violent ones. By using physical violence, the Nuns exercised power not only over the slave women and children, but also over their fellow Nuns.Physical domination was indeed the proof of what they were capable of and, for some Nuns, it expressed a real thirst for power. The daily torturing and beating of the slave women and children enabled the cruelest of the Nuns to assert their place in the Magdalene Laundries and other Institutions. Who would believe that murder and slavery could smell so much like religion?  Owen Felix O’Neill 

17 Comments
Patricia Conlon
25/12/2018 18:25:07

My heart was deeply touched by reading this article which reports the most horrifying cruelty to women and children. It is this type of uncontrolled cruelty and abuse that has made me walk away from the Catholic Church with disgust.
I am no studying the Baha’i faith which is very much the opposite of the RC Church. I wish all devout Catholics would do the same.
My sister was born and adopted in the US and her birth mom reported being treated badly by the Nuns at the place where she went while pregnant. Sadly, those abusive women were sadists who should have been imprisoned themselves and also hospitalized.

Reply
Fran
4/3/2019 10:32:24

Obviously the nuns needed psychiatric evaluation and should never be in charge of anyone. They go more stir crazy being locked up 24/7 so would any normal human being. I went to a convent and the nuns were from Ireland - I landed one who also beat me and her face whilst hitting me with a ruler on the back of my legs was absolutely horrid. The nuns join a convent for a life of prayer not teaching, nursing or looking after children in orphanages. They are not interested in children which was obvious at Tuam .Orphanage, in Ireland plus others..
The Pope is now aware of the priests raping the nuns and getting rid of the babies.

Reply
Nuala Nolan
12/4/2021 11:09:16

I don't think you answered the question "Why were some nuns cruel". You have to ask why are some women cruel because the reality is some women are cruel. The first reason is that they have the power to be cruel. This is true of Jewish women who were in charge of the different units in Concentration also true of the German women who worked in these camps.
They justified their abuse of power by the cause their signed up to.
There were very few nuns in many cases in these Magdalen Laundries which were called Asylums up the foundation of the Free State. The whole idea was for those women to do penance for their sins. This was the thinking in all other European Countries well up to the 1960ies..Watch "The day will come" as Danish series...when the people in charge were not religious.
In the 1901 and 1911 Census in there were about 100 inmates in the Magdalen Loundry in Galway..about 8 or 9 nuns. Which makes you think that older women who were long time inmates were in charge of the day to day running of the Laundry.
It is also true that in the Free State times families could have taken their daughters home at any stage...We had a Constitution which obliges due process before incarceration.
The first stage of this cruelty was the men who walked away and left the women to be outcasts of society.
You can't judge the past in the context of the present where there is social supports by the State for lone parents, unemployed etc...up to 1974...this did not exist for women. The Widow's Pension did not come in til 1934.
Respectability was everything for a family, no man would want to marry a women who had been with another man sexually not to mind a woman that had had a child with another man. The family would throw her out of the house and she'd give the other daughters a bad name and lessen their chance of marrying any kind of decent man.
Nowadays, since the 1970ies women had access to contracepton and nowadays abortion...being a lone parent is acceptable and even part of the norm.
Plenty of Students..in NUIG in the 1950ies and to 1970 get girls working in factories pregnant and then accused them of having multiple boyfriends...no DNA at these times. They left the unfortunate girls to their fate.
As you say the nuns were mostly from rural areas. They became boarders while in Secondary School and then joined up they would have no idea for the most part about sexuality's. They would see women who had sex outside marriage as being deviant. Once they joined up they were not allowed to visit their family home...even to the funeral of a parent. Their thinking was instutionalized as of course they were too.
During the time of the French Revolution there was a Jannist

Reply
Mary
13/4/2021 11:57:11

Pls explain in detail why this was a cruel society thank you

Char
1/2/2021 01:48:03

Clearly a huge part of Babylon the great! Revelation 18:2-4...2-"She has fallen! Babylon the Great has fallen, and she has become a dwelling place for demons and a place where every unclean spirit and every unclean and hated bird lurks! 3-For because of the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, all the nations have fallen victim, and the kings of the earth committed sexual immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth became rich owing to the power of her shameless luxury." 4-And I heard another voice out of Heaven say: "Get out of her, my people, if you do not want to share with her in her sins, and if you do not want to receive part of her plagues." Keep on seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. Does any of what these Nuns did sound righteous to you? There is but one truth...so start searching and praying and seeking and asking..What is the Truth? Gods truth? It certainly isn't Catholicism. Gods people, "get out of her."

Reply
Grace
26/5/2021 10:00:44

These Irish nuns emmigrated to Australia and brought the Catholic Churches forced adoption practices with them. My son was stolen by an Irish nun, Sister Euphrasia Nihil , Head nun at St. John of God Hospital in Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia on 12th October 1982.

Reply
Sharla
4/9/2023 19:37:17

Just a quick question was this just some random kidnapping because you was in a hospitial or was you part of the Mommy and Baby homes/ Magdalene Laundries/Asylums? I'm a college student doing a biblical research on 19th Centuries Magdalene Laundries and how they contributed to the US Prison System. I have watch several documents about young women being put in these homes then getting pregnant by the very Priest that brought them there then take the babies and adopting them out to married couples. Sorry if this drags up trauma but I'm very interested in your story. Thanks.

Reply
Jon collins link
24/11/2024 11:50:42

im slim nice looking english boy of 17 live in a room in birmingham uk and although im not catholic or Irish known these irish nuns at convent 2 miles away for around 5 months and sometimes invite me for a cup of tea or a chat and one of them able to confide in if ive any problems etc in her room and find strs and nuns wonderfull on the good work they do around the world etc and i don't all the lies in the media regarding sexual abuse by Irish nuns, those who claim nuns treated them badly etc are only after compensation nothing else, jon

Icegypsy58
17/7/2021 06:44:21

Born into Catholicism and devout as a child, I witnessed cruelty and abuse by Sisters of IHM. I saw a boy hit on the knuckles with a steel ruler at 7 years old. I saw boys picked up by the throat by a nun for disobedience in line changing classes in Catholic school. I was slapped across the face hard for talking during a movie in 8th grade. I was more in shock that the bitch assaulted me.
In high school I realized that what we were taught about loving one another was just words. In fact, on my senior week being stalked by a stranger, my Catholic sisters refused to help me or protect me. Flagrant and cruel. Unkind. Unforgiving. I became agnostic when I learned about the Crusades. Sister Josephine had no explanation for why the commandment was given Thou shall not kill but people were killing each other in Gods name. Total hypocrisy with no explanation. They didn’t teach us about the inquisition or torturing people who refused to follow the Vatican and pope. In fact, one priest was a child molester at our high school.
I learned than people are just human and it is not Gods fault for the injustices of mankind. Yet, even now, I continue to read horrible things about the church and popes. Nuns. Priests. It’s a shame that it’s like this. But that’s human nature. The act of forgiveness is powerful.

Reply
Peter
18/2/2024 10:34:25

The Crusades were justified in their origin. It was a response to muslim aggression to Christians. (Of course during it local feudal nobles saw it as a vain opportunity to gain faim and wealth. As happens now with corrupt politicians and businessmen)

Dont forget that almost all of Spain was conquered by the Moors and late almost entirely conquered by the Muslims. They filled Churches with Christians then burnt them down, looted the towns and kidnapped the women for "harems" which were essentially brothel where Spanish women were made to be sex slaves are raped for their entire lives.
The inquisition was in response to that. You could definitely see how local lords ans villages would have wanted revenge (not saying its justified).

These things dont happen in a vacuum.
The entire holy land was stolen from us. The Othodox betrayed us and was the reason the second crusade failed. Then they themselves killed tens of thousands of Catholics living in Constantinople and desecrated the Catholic Churches there. The emperor also refused to pay the French what he had promised after they helped him regain power. Which resulted in the French (not the Church) attacking and looting Constantinople.

The Ottoman empire later conquered a weakened Constantinople a few hundred years later (look up what a janissary is and the mountain of skulls they built in the Balkans)

Reply
Sheila Doswell
29/5/2022 19:08:42

I relatiated at nuns school in UK.
I was lucky one.
They took great delight in saying my mother died at school assembly. .
Vicious evil people..
My child never went to church or catholic upbringing.
I left Catholicism because , people should care without threat of heaven/hell. .

Reply
Kandace Chinn
19/3/2023 21:25:52

After watching The film, The Magdelene sisters, it really shakes me up asking how could parents just dump their daughters here sinners or not, and we are all sinners, I am sure their parents were not saints! This reawakens all those orphans murdered and secretly buried at the orphanages in Ireland or was it Scotland? How could the people just allow this abuse , it was like the torture camps for the Jews where they were sent to die????? The modern nuns by and large perform such wonderful works Yet there still is systemic evil abuse In Convents and wicked , perverted Nuns forcing young novices into sexual abuse, which is the cause of the longstanding list if suicides by young women in Indio's convents! And anti pope Francis has not ,all they wished to do was to devote their lives to the glory and service of god and instead many of these radiant souls were subjected to sexual deviancy of not only faux priest Fuax Nuns too!

Reply
STEPHANIE POWELL link
17/9/2023 11:47:38

After reading all the atrcities these nuns commited,I am sure the dEvil encouraged this behavior.Catholisism is supposed to be the true religion,but I believe it justifies cruelty and demeaning behavior for the "love" of God

Reply
Rafael Viola link
13/12/2023 20:41:08

I was at two children’s homes ran by Birmingham archdiocese three nun who ran them were the sisters charity of St Paul Apposol monsters St Edward’s boys shcool Croome Court I had vicious beating at the two places the nuns the nuns were investigated for murdering children at both homes and priests ware jailed for rape St Edward’s boys school was part of Father Hudsons homes mere Birmingham one of the nuns at Croome Court was called the karate nun famous for beating vunrable children I was part of the iiicsa the inglish inquiry that was a farce I became a whistleblower after I was hushed up the inquiry covered up cover ups I have a book out called Stealing Lives it’s well worth a read find out the true facts about my journey

Reply
Janet
31/5/2024 09:27:53

This article still does not explain to me why Nun , the Mercy Nuns in Australia for instance were so cruel. Has a nun every apologised for their sinister behaviour

Reply
John Burke
24/7/2024 23:55:03

Why such cruelty in the Catholic church and its religious doctrine from Bible teachings justify the fear of the hand of God would strike one ? My first time to read such horrible accounts of nuns and priests in what is supposed to be the true religion. Shame Shame Shame Shame ( if there is a hell they will be forever there )
The entire account of the printed matter from the fortunate survivors makes me sick to my stomach to practice my faith in the Catholic Church.

Reply
Miss Joanne Howle
4/4/2025 21:47:28

Demonic faith evil and twisted

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    March 2025
    May 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
    • Blackrock College
    • The Pope’s Pedophile >
      • Mother-Baby-Homes Bill 2022
      • Archbishop Diarmuid Martin >
        • HOT NEWS
  • Felix's Blog
    • The Keepers-Maskell's Irish Story
    • Gallery >
      • Tuam's Stolen Orphan Funds
    • Mission Statement
    • Pope Blog >
      • About
      • Around the World
  • Irish Priests
    • Priests Convicted >
      • Bishop Eamonn Casey
      • Country by Country
      • The Paraclete >
        • Christian Brothers >
          • Laundries & Schools >
            • List of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland
            • Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools of Ireland
            • COLLABORATIVE FORUM
            • Sunday’s Well
            • Names Of 800 Babies
          • Merciless Nuns
  • Videos & Books
  • World Reports
    • Technical Report on the Tuam Site
    • Official Reports
    • Final Report on Tuam
    • 3rd Interim Report
    • The Ryan Report
    • Contact >
      • C.A.B.
  • America Priests
  • Vaccines
    • Slavery >
      • Genocide >
        • Wealth
        • Irish Census Reports >
          • TimeLine >
            • Statistics
  • Prolific Irish Pedophile-Priests
    • Poland
  • Pedophilia Classification
  • Reparations
  • Whom is Kidding Who?
  • Press Reports
  • CANADA
  • Crimes/Names of Canadian Clergy