Photo: Bonnie Armijo
DALLAS, May 1, 2013 - Bonnie Armijo
awoke from the warm embrace of a dream and grimaced as she realized she
was back in her bed on the third floor of St. Anne’s Institute in
Albany, New York.
St. Anne’s was a Magdalene asylum for girls who had
been labeled by either the courts or their families as having “fallen”
from moral virtue.
Established by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages
to provide a place where reformed prostitutes would cleanse their sins
in preparation for marriage, these institutions proliferated across
Europe into Ireland, Scotland and across the ocean to Australia, Canada
and the United States. They took a dark turn during the industrial
revolution in the 1800’s and became workhouses where girls as young as
fourteen worked in laundries and were subject to a cruel and abusive
form of penance to “restore their virtue.”
As a young girl of fifteen, the Irish singer Sinead
O’Connor spent eighteen months in a Magdalene Laundry. Her Saturday
Night Live appearance that sparked huge controversy when she ripped up a
picture of the Pope was motivated by the sexual and physical abuse she
had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church.
Singer Sinead O’Connor on SNL in 1996 and more recently
The few who witnessed the institutions saw prisons with towering stone walls topped with barbed wire, where once inside all hope was stolen from the very depths of your soul.
Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/heart-without-compromise-children-and-children-wit/2013/may/1/survivor-magdalene-laundries-speaks-out-bonnies-st/#ixzz2S71weLL0
Follow us: @wtcommunities on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment