Rite and Reason: Given the choice between dental surgery without anaesthetic and The Magdalene Sisters call your dentist for an appointment immediately. The film raises too many important issues to be dismissed as just another skirmish in the vast anti-Catholic crusade allegedly waged by enemies of the church in the media, the arts and the academy, writes Richard Blake
It is, however, a strong polemic written and directed by a very angry artist intent on indicting not only the women's workhouses run by the Catholic Church in Ireland until the end of the 20th century but the social and institutional structures that permitted them.
Like any good prosecutor, he presents the evidence to the most damning effect possible. Peter Mullan clearly has little love for the Irish church, or to judge from this film, the Irish people.
At the same time, no one denies that the material he presents, however harshly, is for the most part accurate. Even if the facts might be selected unfairly and then embellished to serve the dramatic purposes of a film, the message provides the occasion for reflection for Catholics, and if we are to be truly impartial, for their critics as well.
I've been in Boston during the ordeal of the priest sex-abuse scandal. During those awful months as the story was breaking, each edition of the Boston Globe and every local newscast rubbed the proverbial salt into gaping wounds. The Globe was in the hunt for a Pulitzer prize, which it received.
Clearly, some in the media were enjoying this a bit too much and using the occasion to settle long-held grudges against the Catholic Church, the old Irish establishment of the city or even with Cardinal Bernard Law, who stood with his chancery staff at the ground zero of what was casually and with varying degrees of accuracy called a cover-up. Press coverage was often selective and at times nasty.
Little if any mention was made of enormous legal fees at stake in the multi-million dollar settlements. Still, as we lived through this darkest of hours for the American Catholic Church, one could argue as I do, that we as Catholics were forced to examine clerical culture with its French-cuffed aristocracy with more honesty than ever before. As a church, we're humbled and hurting, but probably a lot stronger as a result.
That is why I am reluctant to attack The Magdalene Sisters despite its harshness. The fact that something like the events portrayed in the film could have happened in western Europe in our lifetimes and in our church should encourage us to move beyond the indisputable elements of bias in the presentation to ponder several uncomfortable realities about our recent history.
In his script Peter Mullan has deliberately violated to good effect a fundamental principle of screen writing by failing to provide any reasonable, likeable characters to provide contrast for the malice of the villains.
He offers not one compassionate priest, nun or parent. They are all cruel, unfeeling, intolerant monsters, each of them. The film does not set out to indict individuals, but a system, an institution and ultimately the people who allowed such atrocities to survive for more than a century.
What makes the viewing particularly painful for Catholics, who may be excused for a sensitivity on these points after a continuous raking in the media during the past two years, is the way these partial truths presented in the film reinforce the worst of current anti-Catholic prejudices.
The over-arching story is that the Roman (note: "Roman" to underscore alien) Catholic Church is obsessed with preserving an outmoded, unnatural and destructive sexual ethic. The unspoken other side of the story is that secular opinion leaders are equally obsessed by gender issues as a test of modernity and tolerance.
The diverse manifestations of this conflict of cultures fit neatly into a simplistic paradigm of good and evil, freedom and repression, health and neurosis: gay marriage, contraception, choice, divorce-and-remarriage, women priests, recreational sex. In each case, the church, we are told, proves itself reactionary in contrast to enlightened secular society.
The Magdalene Sisters plays up this sexual preoccupation. For the narrow-minded Irish people, in Peter Mullan's mind, sexuality was the one unforgivable sin that demands a life of atonement.
I wanted to stand up in the theatre and shout: "It's not like this! Many Irish families are loving. Most clergy and religious are compassionate. This is a sickness among a few! Where is the wider picture, the balance?"
But in the present climate among those critics who lack the experience and wisdom to place such horrors within a reasonable set of contexts, demurrer can be heard as denial and, as recent events have shown, denial is tantamount to a lie.
Why did such things happen? For a number of reasons, I suppose. In Ireland, the government was happy to have social services provided on the cheap, so responsible authorities were reluctant to step in.
Religious orders provided the personnel to run institutions; but getting involved with the penal system seems with the glaring wisdom of hindsight to have been a colossal blunder.
Why did it last until an estimated 30,000 women had been committed to such places and until bodies discovered in unmarked graves brought the realisation that something profoundly evil was going on? The last such workhouse closed in 1996.
Peter Mullan argues that the Irish people, the Catholic Church, the families and the inmates themselves were trapped in their own insularity, just like the Taliban in the most inaccessible reaches of Afghanistan.
That is the root of the problem. Lacking any mechanisms for self-criticism or for hearing criticism from the outside world, they merely accept their own version of their traditions as the way things were intended to be.
Peter Mullan's film is angry, harsh in its judgments, sensational to a fault, simplistic in its analysis and deliberately condemnatory. For Catholics, it is infuriating and humiliating. Perhaps that's why we should see it.
This is an edited version of an article by Father Richard Blake, S.J., Professor of Fine Arts and co-director of the Film Studies Programme at Boston College.
*Republished with permission of America and americamagazine.org