The Catholic church sold my child

[lemonbeam]

It began with a chance encounter at a New Year’s party in 2004. I was trying to leave, but a woman said she had a message for me. She knew I had been a journalist and she had a friend who wanted my help to solve a family mystery. I agreed to a meeting, and found myself embarking on a five-year quest for a man I had never met.

The woman’s friend was called Jane, a financial administrator from St Albans. She was in her late 30s and had been through an emotional experience. Just before Christmas, her mother, Philomena, tipsy on festive sherry, had revealed a secret she had kept for 50 years – she had a son she had never mentioned to anyone.

Jane said her lost brother would be in his early 50s and probably living in America. The reason for the secrecy was that he had been born outside of marriage in Ireland at a time when such things were considered shameful.

A little later I met Philomena herself. She told me she had given birth in a country convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary on 5 July 1952. She was 18 when she met a young man who bought her a toffee apple on a warm autumn evening at the county fair. “I had just left convent school,” she said with an air of wistful regret. "I went in there when my mother died, when I was six and a half, and I left at 18 not knowing a thing about the facts of life. I didn’t know where babies came from … "

When her pregnancy became obvious, her family had Philomena “put away” with the nuns. After her baby, Anthony, was born, the mother superior threatened Philomena with damnation if ever she breathed a word about her “guilty secret”. Terrified, she kept it quiet for more than half a century. “All my life I couldn’t tell anyone. We were so browbeaten, it was such a sin. It was an awful thing to have a baby out of wedlock … Over the years I would say ‘I will tell them, I will tell them’ but it was so ingrained deep down in my heart that I mustn’t tell anybody, that I never did.”

More: guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/19/catholic-church-sold-child

 

[Eucharisted]

Let us pray for Mercy for them!

 

[FickleFreckled]

It’s unlikely that the nuns saw themselves as “selling” children. We’re horrified by this now because of changed attitudes but it has to be judged in light of the accepted cultural standards and attitudes as well as those within the Church at that time. It’s very sad, but it’s just one more excuse for public flogging of Catholicism.