To mark the Year of Mercy, this article is one of a series of reflections on the lives of Marists who have worked in New Zealand, and in whose lives mercy has shone. It was first published in the SMNZ newsletter. The exploitation of young women and girls in industrial bondage and sex slavery is as old as history itself. So I felt proud to read of the work of our Marist team in Ranong, treating those with AIDS and providing many with an education able to free them from the cycle of poverty, degradation and early death.
It is strange to imagine this in a New Zealand scenario, especially amidst the prim society of the descendants of the first four ships in Christchurch. Yet that was the setting of the work of Laurence Ginaty at Mount Magdala in Halswell in the south-west of Christchurch. It was the experience of encountering poverty and prostitution as a prison chaplain that fired Ginaty. He had a vision of a refuge, a home that would make possible a new life for such young women and children.
It took years of hard work before this vision began to take shape with the help of two sisters of the Good Shepherd on the small farm at Halswell. By the time of his death in , Mt Magdala had become a local legend. Through the work of a commercial laundry and other small businesses on the property, it had become nearly self-sufficient. Its family had grown to 25 sisters, young women, 62 orphans and eight workmen. The women usually stayed two years, picking up practical skills and learning, ready to live a new life with their own bank account, sometimes in a new place and under a new name.
Born near Dundalk in County Louth, Ginaty was fortunate to come from a well-off farming family able to give him a good education. A committed student, as a youth he felt the strong desire to become a priest and missionary. He was then aged thirty. After ordination, he taught for ten years mainly at CUS in Dublin and during this time got to know Francis Redwood β a relationship that would shape his future.
Soon after his appointment as bishop of Wellington, Redwood had to make a tricky appointment of a parish priest in Christchurch, so he called on Ginaty.
