Latest news with #AnneMarieAllen
Irish Times
11-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Recruited to Opus Dei at age 15: ‘I don't think I've ever come to terms with the enormity of what happened to me'
When Anne Marie Allen was fifteen she was accepted into a catering college with dreams of becoming a chef. Instead she was tricked into a life of domestic servitude with Opus Dei, an institution of the Catholic Church that was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá. Allen worked part time in a local hotel in Ballyvourney Co Cork when two women arrived to her family home saying that they were interviewing for a free catering course. The women said that Allen would receive pocket money of five pounds a week and a job guaranteed by the end of the two year course. This meeting began the 6 year long ordeal chronicled in Allen's memoir Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei . In this episode of The Women's Podcast, the Cork author discusses her experience. READ MORE After a few weeks Allen began to notice 'there didn't seem to be any catering teachers there. There were members of Opus Dei.' These members of Opus Dei were known as 'the local council, the directors, the sub directors, and the Secretary. 'But none of them seemed to have qualifications in catering,' adds Allen. As a teenager she cooked, served, ironed, washed, scrubbed for the members of Opus Dei. 'Not long after I joined, maybe a couple of months, I was called up into the director's bedroom, and she gave me this little bag, and I opened it up, and there was a chain, a kind of barbed wire with two cords in it and a whip. 'She said, 'these are for mortification',' recalls Allen. Allen says that she was told to wear the chain on her leg for two hours every day, and on occasion for an extra hour a day depending on behaviour. The whip was used 'on your back, your legs or your bum'. 'There was other mortifications as well,' says Allen, including but not limited to sleeping on the floor without a mattress, sleeping without a pillow and cold showers. 'They were obsessed with the idea of temptation, of temptation and sin, the occasion of sin,' she says. However, 'the chain and whip were nothing in comparison fraternal correction,' says Anne Marie. 'Fraternal correction as it was marketed to us was a way of helping us improve our spiritual life and and how to become more aligned to the perfect member of Opus Dei. But what it was a form of behavior control'. Fraternal corrections were verbal reprimands from your peers based on conduct. 'You were only supposed to get one a week but I remember getting two a day'. Although Allen says that she is in a 'good place now', she says she will 'always be recovering' from her time in Opus Dei. 'I don't think I've ever come to terms with the enormity of what happened to me and what happened to us all. I know. I don't think I'll ever get over it. I will never stop fighting to correct it'. You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
CBC
07-07-2025
- General
- CBC
This woman's Depression Era Garden is full of plants you've probably never heard of
Take a tour of this woman's 'depression era' garden 2 hours ago Duration 2:08 Social Sharing In a small London, Ont., neighbourhood garden, some veggies from a bygone era are growing, and the woman who planted them hopes they can make a comeback to help with food insecurity. Nestled in the centre of the Blackfriars Community Garden, Anne Marie Allen's plot is marked with a large sign that says, "Depression Era Garden." Allen grew up on a farm north of the city, growing and canning food. Now retired as a minister, she started researching that crops were grown at a time when many Canadians went hungry. "A lot of people think the Depression started when the stock market crashed, but it actually started during the war with severe food shortages," she said. During the First World War, shelves were bare as much of the food went to the war effort, Allen explained. She learned many people had to grow their own food to make ends meet, but some of the plants were not what you would find in stores today. Leafy greens, like Good-King-Henry, were common, according to Allen. It has a tough texture, but can be harvested all winter long. Perennial root vegetables like earth chestnuts and skirrets were also popular, she said, and very easy to preserve. The sweetness of skirrets, which has a starchy root, also made them a nice treat when sugar was hard to find. Allen planted all of these and more in her garden this past spring, and made little signs to explain the potential uses for each one. When choosing what to plant, flavour was never a consideration, she said. In keeping with the Depression theme. The most important thing was how long she could store them. "This stores fresh for eight months," she said, showing off a Danish Ballhead cabbage. "And it's one of the biggest cabbages to grow." Since these vegetables are so uncommon today, Allen ordered all the seeds from Small Island Seed Co. on Vancouver Island, a small business specializing in rare, cold-hardy perennial crops. It's hard to explain why these crops have gone out of style, said Richard Kuehnel, Small Island Seed's owner. Skirret, which is similar to a carrot but grows in large bunches, even tastes a bit like a marshmallow, he said. "It's delicious and it's easy to grow. Once you've got it, it's actually hard to kill." Skirret may have disappeared in Canada because it's not a very profitable crop when using modern farm equipment, Kuehnel said. As the roots are made up of many small tubers, it's difficult to harvest and clean unless doing it by hand. With information readily available online, however, Kuehnel believes these old-time perennial crops are becoming more well known. "I find that more people are growing these things than ever, and that's a really cool thing to see." As for Allen's garden, she's looking forward to the end of summer when she can harvest her new vegetables. She said she hasn't tried most of them and it's excited to taste the skirrets more than anything. For now, she'll keep tending her little garden plot and encouraging others in the community to do the same. "I'm hoping that more people will go, 'That's interesting, I want to try that.'"
Irish Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei: ‘Catholicism on cocaine'
Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei Author : Anne Marie Allen ISBN-13 : 978-1804582862 Publisher : Gill Books Guideline Price : €18.99 Young Anne Marie Allen thought Robert Redford was 'a fine bit of stuff altogether'. She inadvertently swore while watching her native Cork lose the 1982 All-Ireland hurling final on television. She wondered aloud why no money could be found to replace her only pair of shoes when the soles started flapping off. For all these 'mortal sins', Allen's strikingly angry memoir recalls, the Opus Dei members who had made her their unpaid skivvy warned that she and her family were on a one-way road to hell. Opus Dei has often been depicted as a sinister cult, most notoriously in Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code, which accuses its murderous leaders of suppressing Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene. Serve's key message, however, is that the global Catholic organisation's brainwashing techniques can also damage lives on a much more mundane level. In plain, forceful prose, Allen explains how a modest village childhood in 1970s Ballyvourney left her ripe for exploitation. The headstrong 15-year-old hotel worker and her friend were seduced by an alluring newspaper advert: 'Cookery school, Galway, no fee, job guaranteed.' At Ballyglunin Park, she soon discovered that her new reality involved constantly preparing meals and washing clothes for Opus Dei's lofty 'numeraries' while receiving zero education or wages. READ MORE Allen's anguished account suggests she suffered a severe case of Stockholm syndrome. 'You have a vocation as big as a house,' she was repeatedly told, persuading her to adopt a drab, lonely regime she wryly calls 'Catholicism on cocaine'. She describes a litany of physical and psychological abuse, including being ordered to self-flagellate with a cilice (a spiked wire) that bit into her thigh for up to two hours a day. The story ends relatively happily with Allen leaving after six torrid years to forge a successful career in the Irish Prison Service, but she accepts that the mental scars from her own captivity may 'never fully heal'. Serve has some limitations. Allen often reconstructs decades-old conversations word-for-word, a technique that adds immediacy but feels deeply artificial. Today she is pioneering an international campaign of ex-Opus Dei domestic servants who want redress from the Vatican, but there is disappointingly little detail about that here. Allen's unvarnished testimony still makes for an urgent, powerful memoir – and a timely reminder that Pope Leo (who reportedly views Opus Dei benignly) has inherited a church with many sins left to confess.
Irish Independent
14-06-2025
- Irish Independent
‘I'm justifiably, unapologetically angry. Angry that Opus Dei exists — a relic of cruelty with no place in this world'
Lured by the promise of a catering course, Anne Marie Allen was recruited into the secretive Catholic organisation at 15. She spent the next seven years as a domestic slave, living a life of self-mortification and servitude. Here, she talks about what really went on behind closed doors and the trauma and shame she was left with Anne Marie Allen is showing me exactly where on her upper thigh she would wear her cilice — a metal chain with sharp spikes on the links — for two hours every day. The higher up and tighter she wore it, the better. 'The looser it was, the more it scraped [the skin], so it was just easier to tie it really tight and then double- or treble-knot it,' she explains. 'And then you whipped yourself on Saturday, to the Hail Holy Queen in Latin. You'd be passing by bedrooms, and you'd hear people doing it. And this was normal.'
Irish Independent
14-06-2025
- Irish Independent
‘Living under total obedience in Opus Dei meant constant fear. Always on high alert. Never being able to relax. Every thought, action or hesitation was judged by the numeraries'
Lured by the promise of a catering course, Anne Marie Allen was recruited into the secretive Catholic organisation at 15. She spent the next seven years as a domestic slave, living a life of self-mortification and servitude. Here, she talks about what really went on behind closed doors and the trauma and shame she was left with Today at 21:30 Anne Marie Allen is showing me exactly where on her upper thigh she would wear her cilice — a metal chain with sharp spikes on the links — for two hours every day. The higher up and tighter she wore it, the better. 'The looser it was, the more it scraped [the skin], so it was just easier to tie it really tight and then double- or treble-knot it,' she explains. 'And then you whipped yourself on Saturday, to the Hail Holy Queen in Latin. You'd be passing by bedrooms, and you'd hear people doing it. And this was normal.'
