Catholic Church.

I went to a state school and some of those teachers were horrible.

Many nuns and priests were shoe horned into the clergy by their families and given no choice in the matter. They didn’t have a vocation and were often totally unsuited to the religious life. Not an excuse for their behaviour but possibly some kind of reason for their bitterness and suppressed anger.

My Mum’s fun loving brother (one up from her) was the chosen one. He was at a seminary and contacted his older sisters for help. They sent him cash and a boat ticket. He was made to spend a whole nights in the freezing empty church praying. The family then heard that he contracted pneumonia and died! I guess there was a lot more to the story but we will never know.

One of my school nuns was fine with me, possibly because I was very small for my age. She was from the Gorbals. She was awful to my now sister in law and was given to throwing blackboard dusters at some children’s heads. The other nun was very sweet and gentle but could keep order by a click of her tongue. We didn’t want to upset her!

I think what needs to be understood is that any universal religion, is like the EU, there is a universal set of rules that all broadly agree with and then underneath, there are strong nations with their own culture and traditions.

We have seen this in the Muslim community, where muslims in this country come from a wide range of countries and those from each country bring with them, incorporated into their religion, a host of cultural practices that are particular to them. FGM, Honour killings and forced marriages are all associated with different cultural beliefs within the Muslim community.

Things are no different within the Christian community. The CofE has divergence on attitudes to homosexuality, which are as much driven by the cultural background of the countries involved as by their religious beliefs.

The catholic church is the same. The truly appalling things that happened in Ireland arise from the cultural background of the catholic religion in Ireland. Over the many centuries, the Irish people founght to hold on to their religious and cultural identity under the oppressive rule of the British. Not for nothing were the big (protestant) Anglo-Irish familes known as The Ascendency. From the early 17th century the British government encouraged the emigration of protestants to Ireland. I could go on about the oppression Irish catholics faced in their own country, but I won't.

This led to a fusion between nationality and religion, they became one and the same thing. Irish society developed into an inward looking group always defensive against any intruder. Priests became their leaders, because they were usually the only people with any education. To have a son who became a priest gave a family status.

Put these pressures, with the countries isolation on the far edge of Europe and this toxic brew produced Irish catholicism, insular, and religiously obsessed. To break any of the rules was to reject your community and they knew what to do with people like that.

Terrible things happened in the name of religion in Ireland. I am no apologist for them, but these institutions were only in Ireland. They were not universal, they did not exist in England or other countries.

As PippaZ says It is hard to remember just how stifling societies rules were in the early twentieth century. and I would add most certainly in the 19th century.

I am half Irish on both sides of my family.

Polly99

Just out of interest my mum told me that when she had her first child (early fifties) her MIL insisted on her going to be churched afterwards. They were both CofE. She wasn't very happy with the idea but went along with it to keep the peace. This was in London.

My paternal grandmother was C of E and wanted my mother to be churched after I was born. It was one of the many issues about which my mother and grandmother disagreed.

It was social stigma to be pregnant and unmarried,if you were rich you could send your daughter to "an aunt" in the country for the duration of the pregnancy and have the baby adopted .She could return home and it was never mentioned,in effect it hadn't happened.
If you were poor you sent them to a home ,run by all religions for unmarried mothers ,the adoptions would be organised before you arrived and the babies handed over within weeks.
To say it was church LED is wrong ,that is not excusing how these poor girls and young wmen were treated but in many cases the pregnancies were the result of incest and the family just didn't want the girl around .
Now of course women can decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term or terminate ,whatever her choice you can guarantee there will still be folk who name call and accuse ,even in the 21st century ...scroungers is a common name they 're called.I've even seen it on here .If they terminate in some places they're called murderers!!Yet almost without exception the fathers of these children get off scot free .Inequality at its best! My late father was illegitimate he was lucky his GP's kept him to let his mum get on with her life,it was quite unusual in the early 1920's

Women in 2021 condemning women of 50 years ago and earlier.

Monica I beg to differ there were certainly homes like these all over the UK ,

In England and Wales there were many pregnant girls in
mental hospitals.

paddyanne There were certainly mother and baby homes of all varieties over the UK and the regimes in many of them, regardless of religious affiliation, would horrify us now, but they were not embedded within a community that was so at one with those that ran the homes. Deaths could not be unaccounted for, girls were not kept in them for years with no way of getting out or escaping.

Having said that, women were sometimes committed to mental homes after having an illegitimate child, but this was not a religious matter, once again, simply a projection of attitudes in society at the time.

I remember my MIL saying that our children were illegitimate as her son and I had not been married in a Catholic church. That was in the early 70s.

I don't see anyone on here condemning the women of 50 years ago Annie, in fact quite the opposite.

I would add, although I am not an expert on the subject, that I think the regimes in the Irish Institutes were at their most severe in the early 20th century and specifically after the partition of the country in 1921.

My grandfather, the illegitimate son of a catholic factory worker, born in Ulster in the 1880s, seems to have always been brought up within his extended family and I have no reason to think that his mother was ever institutionalised when he was born. I do wonder whether this was because he was born in Ulster, not in the area that became southern Ireland.

An extremely delicate topic. I converted to Catholicism and used to attend church when I married a practicing Catholic. Over the years I have read articles and watched programmes on various aspects of the Catholic Church and some have left me horrified that children and young women were treated so inhumanely by those claiming to be religious and following God's word. They have been inexcusably slow in dealing with pedophiliac priests, to name just one issue they need to address.

Yes those who say it happened in England too, you're right. I grew up in a town in Surrey that had a lot of mental institutions/homes as they were known then. All closed now, mostly turned into flats. One of my close friend's mother was a psychiatric nurse and all sorts of people were in these places who shouldn't have been, such as young women who became pregnant outside marriage, incarcerated in such places for years deemed mentally unstable. Maggie O'Farrell wrote an excellent book, "The Disappearance of Esme Lennox" on that very theme.

I suppose I should have added those "mental hospitals" weren't under the auspices of the catholic church, but the young women were still locked up, as Monica pointed out, for what what was considered a social transgression. I think I have nevertheless read about catholic mother and baby homes in England, possibly they weren't so prolific as they were in Ireland, Ireland being predominantly catholic.

Terribull The reforms of the 19th century, which moved from treating mental illness as a public entertainment and/or incarceration believed, before drugs or cures of any kind were available, that the mentally ill would benefit from living in good quality caring institutions built in the wuiet of the countryside where the air was pure and fresh, which is why so many of them were built round London on heaths and downs. I lived both in north Surrey and East Berkshire where these building were not uncommen. For some years I lived within an alarm sound of Broadmoor.

Most of these buildings were magnificently and expensively built, with chapels and theatres and surrounded, often by their own farmland. This is why they are now turned into (expensive) flats, surrounded y housing estates.

From the quality of the care they were prepared to lavish on those with mental disabilities, they, within their period showed far more concern for these people than we do today.

In the late 60s I rented a room in a house where other girls lived. A girl arrived from the country and didn't mix or speak to any of us.One day she left her door open and on the bed was a case filled with baby clothes. There was a large convent in the next street and we presumed that was where she went the next day.

In some places, I think India is one, girls having their period are banished to an animal shed for the duration.

One was called 'churching' where a new mother was considered unclean and sinful, even though married, and had to go through a blessing called churching before she could resume social life.
Peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, unheard of in Cof E

We were C of E and my mother was rather surprised when I went out visiting after DC1 was born without being churched. That was in the 1970s.

No superstition, no thought of being unclean, but to give thanks
The same as Anniebach and no threats of hell and damnation to either me or the baby!

What is SM please not on list of acronyms. Incidentally have noticed a few occasions where the acronym used is not on the list. Who is responsible for adding new ones?

Not going to talk about the RC church - but just to confirm that churching was common in the CofE when I was a child (50s) but I was told it was to give thanks for the safe delivery of mother and child.

GillT57. Nuns are women

I had to be churched before they would christen my son in the 60's. This was a C of E. It was a very humiliating experience having to repent for my sin of begetting a child. The three of us undergoing this were all married women so to the church sex was a sin whether you were married or not. But only a sin if you were a woman. No men were required to repent.

I had children in the early 1970s. The parish priest who baptised DS when he was three weeks old, never even mentioned churching, although I had already made the decsion to refuse if it was offered, because I understood what its original purpose was.

I remember my mother being churched after my youngest sister was born in 1950.