Pray For Our Sinners celebrates a couple in Navan who resisted and refused to go along with the flow. They took reputational risks to step into situations and say no. Husband and wife, Dr Paddy and Dr Mary Randles opened their home to young women, offering sanctuary and love, respecting their wishes above the shameful sentiment of the time.
Paddy had first-hand experience of corporal punishment as a child attending a Christian Brothers school in Dublin. And when the effects of beating children came to his attention in his GP practice in Navan, he spoke out. The Irish national media wouldn’t touch the story, even after the English News of the World picked it up. The film describes the extraordinary lengths the clergy went to to suppress subsequent reporting.
Now widowed, Mary tells the documentary maker about their actions around corporal punishment and standing up for young women – girls – who were being forced to give up their babies. Mary set up the town’s family planning clinic. There’s testimony from some of those Navan children – still showing visible signs of the trauma all these years later – whose stories were heard and their lives impacted positively by the Randles courage to ignore the fear and chill factor, and instead work against the system, advocate for change, and support the unsupported. All this happened under O’Shea’s nose as a child growing up in Navan.
Pray For Our Sinners raises the question of why so few people stood up to the church? The silent majority are the real ‘sinners’ of the film’s title. God may have been everywhere, but his spirit was profoundly missing. Little wonder that the backlash against institutional religion has been so harsh as the Irish theocracy collapsed. While the film reasserts the post-partition power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, it also finds room to question the role and motivations of Father Andy Farrell.
A simple retelling of his involvement in the shameful history might dress him as the villain. The man responsible for enacting church policy and shepherding his parishioners to conform to the brutal treatment of young people. There are those in the town who rather robustly and uncritically venerate the popular clergyman. Yet, O’Shea embraces a contradiction. While Farrell has many questions to answer about his role signposting girls towards mother and baby homes and arranging forced adoptions, he too was a dissenter and created resistance in other areas, making himself vulnerable to the church hierarchy he ultimately questioned.
Given the potential for community amnesia, it’s important to record history and celebrate those who stood up and intervened when others sat back and turned their heads. There must have been other Paddys and Marys, other allies quietly disrupting the status quo back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And we could surely do with more today. People willing to dissent, and willing to accompany others whose voice is not being heard. Which all reminds me of a favourite TedxBelfast talk by Lisa McElherron about dissidents back in October 2013.
Film previews often happen about 10 o’clock in the morning. Those attending emerge from the darkened cinema into the brightness and quickly disperse to carry on with their day’s work and duties. Yet time paused at the end of Pray For Our Sinners and for twenty minutes, those at its preview stood and chatted, vigorously unpicking what we’d seen and heard, running our own after-show discussion.
Pray For Our Sinners is an incredibly good documentary, well-constructed, engaging and quite upbeat despite the issues it is addressing. Catch it at Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 27 April. (The 6pm screening on Tuesday 25 is followed by a Q&A with the director.)
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1 comment:
Yes, indeed there were others struggling against the abuse. Most notably Constance O'Connell - 1954 founder of the School Children's Protection Organisation - SCPO:
O’Connell’s campaign appears to have been largely aimed at forcing the Department of Education to enforce the existing regulations
governing the use of corporal punishment in the national school system
and her initiative produced a succession of debates in both the upper
and lower houses of the Irish parliament. When Senator Owen Sheehy
Skeffington raised the issue of school punishment in the upper house or
Seanad (Senate) on the 30 June 1955, he admitted to having been ignorant
of its extent and severity until being invited to participate in a radio debate about the SCPO campaign.
y. Reading from some of the letters that O’Connell had
published in the SCPO booklet he said it was clear that children were ‘all
too often […] beaten for mere failure at lessons’ and particularly ‘for fail ure in two subjects, Catechism and Irish’. Commending Fr Robert Nash,
a Jesuit columnist with the Sunday Press, for having warned that the use
of corporal punishment by members of the religious teaching orders could
cause some children to grow up hating religion ... (excerpts from my 2019 book "Love's Betrayal: the Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland)
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