The middle-aged woman in the black dress behind the counter inspected me. My stomach sank. How could she know that I needed a ticket so that I could fulfill a sacred promise my mother had made 22 years earlier? Traveling in communist Cuba was a bureaucratic nightmare, tickets taking weeks or months to obtain, if one could get them at all. What's more, I had no ID and was suspiciously dressed. I felt certain she had heard every sob story ever concocted.

It all came flooding out: How a childhood condition had required me to have leg surgery, and my worried mother had sworn that we would visit Cuba's patron saint—Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre—upon my recovery. But we never got to the shrine outside Santiago that houses the figurine.

Shortly before my illness, the communist revolution had erupted, sending many of my high school friends to jail. My mother knew I would be next, so she arranged asylum for me in America, where I would attend Catholic University, go on to a career in international banking, and become a collector of Cuban memorabilia.

On this trip I had only a few precious days in Cuba. How could I explain how much this simple trip meant, how I had clung to the idea of seeing Our Lady of Charity for more than two decades?

I don't know how much the woman behind the counter heard, but she understood. "I have a son in Milwaukee," was all she murmured. She appreciated the pain of exile and dislocation, the importance of faith. She knew! In a moment a ticket miraculously appeared. I will never forget her smile and kindness. Continue reading

Sources

• Emilio Cueto, as told to John F. Ross in Smithsonian Journeys Quarterly
• Image: Vatican Radio

O'Connor, now 46, said she was sent to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity laundry in Drumcondra, Dublin, when she was 14 years old after she was labelled a "problem child".

She told the Irish Sun she had suffered abuse as a child and began stealing as a teenager. Her parents were separated and her worried father thought he was doing the right thing by sending her to be "rehabilitated" at the facility.

"We were girls in there, not women, just children really," she said. "And the girls in there cried every day.

"It was a prison. We didn't see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood.

"We were told we were there because we were bad people. Some of the girls had been raped at home and not believed.

"One girl was in because she had a bad hip and her family didn't know what to do with her.

"It was a great grief to us," she said.

"There was no rehabilitation there and no therapy. Nothing but people telling us we were terrible people. I stopped the stealing all right. I didn't want to be sent back there. But at what cost?"

O'Connor spoke out after the release of a report from an official investigation which found that there was "significant state involvement" in the incarceration of more than 10,000 women and girls in the laundries from 1922 until 1996.

The controversial singer with a shaved head has become well known for her strongly expressed views on organized religion, women's rights, war and child abuse.

She tore a photo of Pope John Paul II during an appearance as a musical guest on the American television show Saturday Night Live.

In the late 1990s she was ordained a priest in the independent Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church. She has been married four times and has four children, and says she has also had three relationships with women.

Sources:

Irish Sun

Wikipedia

Image: The Times