I’ve never lived in England but if this article is correct then there was financial help available for an unwed mother who wished to keep her child, whether or not checks were actually cut. Surely the Church personnel involved must have known, so any way you look at it it does seem like they lied to the unwed mothers. This amounts to church agency personnel committing a mortal sin. For what? For money? To circumvent the embarrassment of Protestants seeing unwed Catholic women with babies? Who knows? Either way, the bishop’s apology is long overdue.
There are a whole host of assumptions underlying this comment.
The article already falls on the side of slanting and bias by saying that ‘felt pressured’ by society, by families, by church, is somehow equivalent to ‘being *forced *by the Catholic church.’ As a result of this obvious bias, I require actual hard evidence of what financial help was available from the government for unwed mothers in the 1950s. I’ve never heard of such governmental help at that time. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, but between my personal knowledge and the slant of the article, I need to see that before I condemn an entire faith or group of bishops or priests.
There is the assumption that priests deliberately lied. Remember, we’re talking about the 50s and 60s. Today, everybody is being given ‘training’ on every topic under the sun. That wasn’t so in those days. A priest was an expert on theology, *not *on what social services were available to every segment of the population.
There is a further assumption that these (supposed) lies were for the sake of money. As others have pointed out, any ‘pressure’ to give the child up for adoption may have had everything to do with believing it was better for mother and child both, and absolutely nothing to do with money.
As for the women feeling ‘forced’, given the stigma against unwed motherhood still current in those days, I can easily see how a young woman in that predicament could feel she was being forced to choose the option that would most please those closest to her, even if she feared she would regret it for the rest of her life. And yes, I have heard of girls young enough and scared enough that they felt ‘forced’ into getting an abortion.
Looking around at the societal cost of millions of single mothers today…I think there was probably very good reason for ‘stigma.’ Single motherhood is usually hard on both the mother and child and results not only in their own personal financial poverty (often) and hardship, but in all that results from children being raised without fathers in the home.
Our personal pleasure or regret is not the sole basis for decisions, as our choices impact all of society.
I’ll agree with you that as badly as members of the Catholic Church have messed up, some members of the other faith have done much worse. But until those concerns become more pressing and immediate I don’t think it will be a popular topic of conversation.
Terror attacks are a near daily occurrence around the world. Sweden has no-go zones. More and more women in Germany and Sweden are speaking up about the sexual assault, harassment and rape by Muslims. Churches are being burned and Christians tortured, beheaded, imprisoned and driven from their homes.
You’re right, those concerns are not pressing or immediate. Much more important to talk about whether the Catholic Church in all its evilness, suggested to unwed teenage girls that their babies might be better off in stable, two parent homes. That’s really more awful, pressing, and immediate than, say, people being blown up and killed at an office Christmas party a few months ago.
