Catholic Church.

Mamardoit

Anniebach

I was churched after the birth of my two daughters ,1969 and 1970, Church of Wales.

No superstition, no thought of being unclean, but to give thanks

Yes I know that this did happen at our village C of E in the 1960s. Maybe a bit later. It was to give thanks that mother and baby were well.

I was churched after the birth of my 2 children, ( CofE ), in 1972 & 1980, for those very same reasons.
Thank you Anniebach & Mamardoit.

I can understand those who have no faith disagreeing with
giving thanks to God ,churching, but I wonder how many married in church

Newatthis The advice to go out and multiply is an Old Testament command, not a New Testament comand and Christianity is based on the New Testament. it looks back to the Old Testament, it respects it and sees it as prophesying what was to come, but it is not the basis for Christianity.

The decision that priests could not marry was made in the mid 12th century at a time when being a priest was a far more rigourous task than it is now. A priest is expected to devote his whole life to his service as a priest and it was considered that could not happen if he also had family responsibilities.

In the past priests would be serving huge areas and constantly travelling and while priests do not take vows of poverty, as monks do, they are expected to live very simply, especially when they are working with parishioners who are themselves living in poverty. Catholic priests do not receive a minimum salary as many do in other religions and must depend on his parishioners for his stipend, which in poorer parishes may be very small. It is one thing to dedicate oneself to a life of poverty, when you could have a career that was better paid but to expect your wife and child to do so also, is, perhaps a sacrifice too far.

There is nothing in principle to stop the church changing its policy on this - and I suspect this will become needful as vocations fall. Already married men with careers and families are entering the preliminary levels of being priests by becoming deacons, but their service is essentially part time and one day we may have to accept the end of celibacy and having a part time priesthood.

AFAIK ‘churching’ was not confined to the Catholic Church. In a Mediterranean (Orthodox) culture where we once lived, a woman was considered ‘unclean’ when menstruating, ditto after childbirth when there was still a discharge. So she was not supposed to enter the church until she was ‘clean’ again, about 6 weeks later. Whereupon she’d go to be ‘churched’.

Whether the same was once true of the C of E I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
My family was not religious but in mid teens I was confirmed in the C of E - it was a social thing more than anything else - Sundays were so unbelievably boring then and at least you saw your friends at the pre Evensong class on Sunday!

Anyway, IIRC we were given a little book of ‘prayers for women and girls’ - I dare say I’ve still got it somewhere - where I’m pretty sure there was something about ‘the churching of women’.

The recent report says that there is no evidence that woman were forced to sign their babies away but lots of women gave evidence to say it had happened to them. Apparently they are simply to be disbelieved.

I haven’t read this evidence, do they say they wanted to keep
their babies ?

As GillT57 says, earlier in this thread, it was good to see an acceptance that all parties were responsible for this dreadful episode, including the church. To shift all the blame on to the parents or to disbelieve what the girls say happened, is not fair.
The nuns were entirely responsible for their own behaviour towards the women who were supposed to be in their care.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55622548

Treatment of the babies....In an interim report, the commission found that some babies were buried in 20 chambers inside what was a larger decommissioned sewage tank.

Forced adoption......The commission said it found "very little evidence that children were forcibly taken from their mothers".

It continued: "It accepts that the mothers did not have much choice but that is not the same as 'forced' adoption'."

The report contains witness testimony from women who said they had not consented to their child being adopted.

timetogo2016

It`s called being brainwashed imo.
Mostly made up by priests/pastors/fathers and daft old wives tales.

Absolutely!

Thank you vampirequeen I agree the women did not have much choice , they couldn’t go home to their families with their baby . Where could they live ? Social housing wasn’t available .

There was a thread recently on the unkindness of midwives in
NHS hospitals.

No burial was wicked

I know someone who only found out after her MiL had died, that she’d been one of the poor Magdalen Laundries girls. It came out after a half sibling in Ireland had managed to trace family in the U.K.

After she’d had the baby the MiL was sent to the U.K. to a pre arranged job - no choice - she had apparently never seen or communicated with her own family ever again.

This all came as a complete shock to her subsequent adult children - their father was long gone, too, and as far as they were aware he’d never had a clue, either. They deduced that she’d been far too ashamed of her ‘mortal sin’ to ever tell anyone. Apparently she’d come up with a very plausible excuse as to why she’d never had anything to do with her own family - she’d married a British soldier and they would have shunned her on that account.

I heard about all this before the scandal of these ‘homes’ was widely publicised, but an Irish friend told me that it was formerly well known but not spoken of, because it just wasn’t done - then - to criticise anything to do with the church.

I can remember reading that as late as 2019, 90 % of the 3,200 primary national schools were Catholic-controlled. The State paid the salaries of teachers and the upkeep of school buildings, but the church still owned the buildings, making any change difficult.
Church power remains evident in other spheres too. Due largely to the strong influence of Catholic teaching, Ireland legalised divorce and contraception much later than other EU states. Until the recent referendum, Ireland had the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
Societies are profoundly influenced by the dominant cultural and political forces at play. The Catholic Church was the dominant cultural force in Ireland for most of the last century. It was the church that demanded religious and moral exceptionalism and punished those who fell short of these standards. To resist its influence was to risk disgrace for an entire family. Abandonment of their pregnant daughters to the deliberate and conscious neglect of church-run and State-funded “homes” was the price demanded, and sadly, many parents believed they had no choice but to pay it.

Dee can I point out that the most restrictive abortion rules and same sex relationship laws are in teh NORTH of Ireland and thats not run by the Catholic church nor has it ever been .Its not as simple as made out here ,The same "rules" applied in the mainland of Britain ,young women who were pregnant were sent away or had their babies taken off them .Just watch Long Lost Families.

Dee102 but you need to understand why the catholic chiurch achieved such dominance - and for that you need to go into the Irish history and its centuries of oppression under British rule. Deprived of education, excluded from public office with land ownership rules that enhanced poverty. They clung to their religion which was the one thing they had that separated them physically from their oppressors, priests were the only men with any power or education were there leaders.

With any religion, the different cultures of any country will affect how it is interpreted in that country. English catholicism, although heavily influenced by the huge influx of Irish into the country over the last 200 years has always been very different, although pockets of Irish catholicism, did exist, more open and living within a more diverse society.

The catholic church in Ireland grew out of the oppression the Irish suffered , where clinging to your community, obeying all the rules was your greatest protection. Priests and nuns grew up in ordinary Irish catholic families and took the culture of those families into the religious life when they went. It is very easy to just blame the church for everything and forget that it was only able to do what it did because it was supported, in every way by the Irish population.

Agree MOnica but I worked for and with Irish Nuns in the
70’s and 80’s, they were all kind, caring women

paddyanne I should have clarified the North of Ireland. I do still believe though that the Catholic church influenced the North too - alongside other religions.
I believe another long-delayed report into mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland is due to be published this month.

I agree that many women suffered in mainland Britain too - there's a story in my own family about someone being sent to a mental asylum many years ago.

For me it's stories like the person who recounts how she was taken to Bessborough mother and baby home, in Co Cork, as a 13-year-old girl, pregnant after being raped. (The rapist was never charged.) Though her parents wanted her to stay with them, the local hospital refused to allow her to give birth there, after a priest opposed the move. Inevitably, her daughter was put up for adoption by the home. It’s also worth noting that this didn’t occur in de Valera’s Ireland of the 1940s, but in 1977.
The institutional pressure brought to bear on a supportive family contradicts the official line that “society” bore much of the blame for her ordeal. “The one word that keeps coming up in all this is power,” says Mary, as she contemplates the Catholic Church’s influence at the time. “The power they had over the people was mind-boggling.”

We also need to keep in mind the unspeakable figure of 9,000 children dying in the homes

M0nica I agree and do have an understanding...my family origins are Irish.
As you rightly say obeying all the rules was your greatest protection.
Surely we must look at who made those rules and for me it goes back to Church and State.

Let's all have a go at the church again, shall we?

No church exists in a vacuum.

The treatment of unmarrieid mothers in church run homes was no different or worse than what was going on in homes for unmarried mothers that had no religious affiliations at the same time.

Until the 1970's any girl of whom it was said that she had let her boyfriend "go too far" whether she became pregnant or not, was ostracized in most countries of Europe, whether Catholic or Protestant as well as by people who held no religious beliefs whatever.

Until the advent of reliable contraception, society controlled births by making sure that only married people ideally had children. This was done by various rules, some of which can be found in the Bible, where if you look, you can also find a "justification" for beating children, which after all was still practised in our childhood too.

Society as a whole was just as responsible for these norms as any religious denomination, and as we are all children of our times it is society as a whole that should be denigrated for mistakes made in any era, not any particular branch of it.

Gwyneth

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?

I don't think anyone has answered this Gwyneth but I've presumed SM is for step mother.

Not sure about your other question but think it is GransNet admin who might add. You could message them. There are a lot of acronyms/abbreviation/initialism used on the forums that are not on the list.

Surely we must look at who made those rules and for me it goes back to Church and State. These rules came out of the community, as did the clerics.

I have read story after story of people coming from small and beleagured communities in many countries and time and again you read of community rules, implicit, not formally written out, which to not obey leads to you being ostracised and often expelled from the community. These rules will be endorsed and applied by community leaders, often clerics, whether that is an imam, rabi, or priest.

These old superstitions were included in church goings-on because it was important to include superstitious people within the body of the church.

Alexa The church welcomes everyone into the church, it does not have to make special provision for any particular group.

It's not a case of Church bashing. The State/Church are trying to sweep this under the carpet. They cannot be allowed to disregard the statements of women who say they were forced to give up their babies or indeed had their babies adopted without their consent. Neither can they dismiss the fact that the bodies of babies and young children were tossed into a glorified cess pit.

We all have to , or should, make special provision and the church is particularly good at it.

PS see all these letters St Paul wrote addressing special concerns that affected different groups.