THE real Philomena Lee was on the radio this week to talk about
the Oscar-nominated film about her which has just come out on DVD.
She said something I hadn't expected.
Philomena tells the story of an unmarried mother in
Ireland in the 1950s who was sent to a convent in Roscrea to have
her baby. She was then expected to work for four years in the
convent's laundry to "pay" for her care during pregnancy and birth.
While she was there, the nuns - who followed a practice of selling
the babies to "good Catholic families" from America for £1000 a
child - handed her three-year-old boy, Anthony, to a rich woman
from the United States completely without warning one morning.
Philomena did not have the chance even to kiss her child
goodbye.
In later years, she tried repeatedly to find the lost boy - and
it turned out that he, too, had looked for her, returning three
times from Washington to Ireland in a fruitless search. The nuns at
the convent stonewalled mother and son alike, even on his final
visit, when he was dying.
This week, Mrs Lee was interviewed by Clare Balding on Radio 2's
Good Morning Sunday. The shock was her revelation that her
father had disowned her when she became pregnant, and would not
allow her back in the house. To highlight the way in which
unmarried mothers were treated in those days in no way mitigates
the bad behaviour of the Church. After all, the Church played a
large part in shaping the social attitudes that prompted a father
to reject his child at the time when she needed him most. But the
Church was shaped by the times, too.
It is unhelpful to caricature the past. In those days, it was
thought wise to refuse to allow contact between an adopted child
and his birth mother. There was a logic to the idea then that an
adopted child would not thrive if his mother disrupted his fresh
start by peering, literally or metaphorically, through the window
of his new home.
That view has been revised in the UK. Today, we have a better
idea of the kind of psychological impact such deracination can have
- although the law is still unchanged in Ireland, something that
Mrs Lee is campaigning to have changed.
After the interview, Ms Balding played a song by the Dixie
Chicks ("Godspeed Sweet Dreams"), a lullaby written by a father
whose son had been taken by his divorced wife to live on the other
side of the Atlantic. The man sends his love each night at bedtime
through the stars to his forcibly estranged son: "God hears 'Amen'
wherever we are."
The group's lead singer once introduced the song in concert to
an overwhelmingly female audience, and induced a whoop of
emancipated triumph from a feminist in the crowd. No, the singer
admonished, this is not an affirming song about the triumph of a
strong woman; it's a sad song about a little boy who has lost his
father.
There was an irony in that. Once it was the Church that was
guilty of forcibly separating children from their parents. Now it
is a culture of easy divorce. "Conscious uncoupling", to use
Gwyneth Paltrow's phrase, takes its toll on our children when
self-focused grown-ups don't behave like adults.
Every era is strong in the self-righteous sense of its
strengths, and blind to its weaknesses. Perhaps a future generation
will look back on precipitate divorce much as we do now on the
inadequacies of the Church.