Hidden away in a Dublin park is a bench with a plaque that says: ‘To the women who worked in the Magdalen laundry institutions — reflect here upon their lives.’ The Magdalen laundries, named after Mary Magdalene, belonged to an order of nuns who took in pregnant girls whom they called ‘maggies’. They came to public attention a few years ago following the discovery of scores of their graves, and soon former ‘maggies’ were giving accounts of how thousands of young women had their illegitimate babies taken from them and were forced to work unpaid and in silence as a form of atonement for their sins.
How different this is from the example Jesus set in the way he treated the original ‘maggie’, Mary Magdalene – she of the seven demons – whom he honoured as the very first witness of the Resurrection.