In all fairness, the Catholic church in Ireland has invited tremendous public disdain for things such as horrific corruption and scandal, and even enslaving women and children with the tacit approval of Ireland’s government as late as 1996. When that government finally fell, there was reform as great as when the Soviet Union collapsed.
http://americablog.com/2013/02/magdalen-laundries-catholic-ireland-irish-apology.html
“The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which, a new official government report says, over 10,000 women were forced to work without pay at commercial laundries called Magdalene Laundries, operated by the Catholic Church for “crimes” as small as not paying a train ticket.
“...the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone goes as high as 30,000 over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation.
“The women were locked in and not permitted to leave. And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor.
“Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of 23. The youngest entrant was 9 years old.”
The bottom line is that the name of the Catholic church in Ireland right now is “mud”. They are lucky that as an institution, the government is not demanding hundreds of millions of Euros in compensation to its victims.
On the face of it, “enslaving” seems to be a gross misnomer. Requiring people to “work off” their crime for a set period of time isn’t exactly unheard of.