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!
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They did even shittier things to Indigenous kids in Canada... we found the MASS GRAVES.
But you got to admit... First and Last and Always was a hell of an album. And Floodland was a benchmark in the genre.
I initially thought this was about agnes bojaxhiu (teresa). Apparently she's not the only cunt in a veil
These sick fucks are class A war criminals!