Coming Clean: Irish Prime Minister Makes an Extraordinary, Moving Apology for the Magdalene Laundries
Daily Mail Still from The Magdalene Sisters
If you don't know the story of the Magdalene Laundries, or have not seen the harrowing 2002 theatrical film The Magdalene Sisters -- well, it’s another story of infuriating injustice, one of the hidden horrors of European Christian theocracy that you find hard to believe and don't really want to know about, so I hesitate to say that you should, but, yeah, you should. It’s been largely disregarded because its victims were poor, helpless women. Here’s the description of the institutions from RationalWiki:
A Magdalene laundry, also known as a Magdalene asylum [named for Mary Magdalene, the supposed prostitute], was a house for women who had "fallen" from "moral correctness"…
These asylums were a network of laundries operated by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere, and run by the Sisters of a range of orders. Many women lived and died in these institutions with little hope of escape. The only way they could be freed was by being claimed by a relative. Often, family members were told that the women had moved away, and would be impossible to find because they had assumed new identities.