Peter Mullan
Magdalene

One, a hundred, a thousand Magdalene.

There are few things that infuriate and disgust me like violence perpetrated on children, especially when carried out by people of a deceitful and hypocritical nature, hidden in the shadow of presumed religiosity and used as a shield for actions unworthy of being called Christian, with no justification from an ethical or civil standpoint.
This film, Magdalene, awarded with the Golden Lion at Venice in 2002, by Scottish director Peter Mullan, does not precisely depict pedophilia on children (for that, just watch the much-talked-about video on YouTube here) but rather the same insidious physical and psychological violence executed in one of the many convents known as "Magdalene Laundries" that were operational until 1996 in Ireland. Convents that harbored women branded with shame for the fault of becoming pregnant outside of marriage, rejecting a violent husband, or being too attractive and/or extravagant by the standards of the time.

Women who, following demeaning and arduous work at the service of high ecclesiastical ranks, were subjected to corporal and psychological humiliation with the goal of erasing from them any synonym of femininity and independence, bringing these women to a level of almost total debasement.
The story set in 1964 is based on a true story documented and testified by the REAL protagonists interviewed in the end credits.

The film follows a vaguely Altmanian scheme with different stories that intertwine in an escalation of all types of violence (women stripped and whipped in the courtyard, beaten to a pulp, or forced into oral relations with accommodating priests) with a sad portrayal of these Magdalene nuns almost caricature-like for their greed, stinginess, and cruelty spread throughout the film.
A tense, heavy film that keeps us constantly under pressure, which will then find, finally exhausted, a form of "liberation" and moral redemption in the last part of the film.
A story courageous in its own way and outspoken, which did not go unnoticed by comments from the most fundamentalist Catholic world that FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME accused the Venice Festival organizers of "conspiracies" and "lies".
Cardinal Ersilio Tonini (Ersilio?!) cried out scandalized that the Festival had been dishonored. The Osservatore Romano thundered about a film that is a poorly-executed and distasteful caricature and even the ever-present Priest Gianni Baget Bozzo was enraged by the award given to a slanderous and anti-Christian sentiment now widespread in civil society.

It's just a pity that NEVER EVER, I repeat no one has dared to make an official gesture of MEA CULPA, a small reversal, an act of "apology" for all those hundreds of victims (adults as in this case, or young girls in others, which I don't want to dwell on here) who over hundreds of years have suffered violence from those who precisely on Christianity, divine love, and sanctity have masked and hidden away from prying eyes their base instincts and perversions.
NEVER a damn "act of forgiveness" officially in all these years.
Books and encyclicals have been written On the Family (complete with media fanfare like Family Day), on Providence, On the Sacred, On Society, On the meaning of the Crown of Thorns and on a thousand topics but NEVER, I repeat NEVER, a little book written (perhaps) by the hands of the Holy Father himself titled PPP: Priest, Pedophilia, and Forgiveness or similar.

All is silent.
Everything under silence.
Hundreds of years perpetually spent covering everything up.

P.S.
In the meantime while I write these lines, again today in La Repubblica of Thursday May 24 on page 29, Cardinal Herranz speaks seriously of a Silence of the Church as a Due Act in respect of the victims while just a bit further down, in a 15-line snippet, appears the news of a Sardinian missionary sentenced to 16 years because in Nicaragua he raped dozens of children of his mission in Bethany

We are now at one snippet a day.
Fifteen lines, eh?
And then someone dwells on saying the Festival was dishonored? shut up, Ersilio... at least continue to keep quiet, damn it, you're so good at it...