Catholic Church.

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

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.

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.

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

The Paper Bracelet. Rachael English is about these terrible times.

Probably not a story to read during these difficult times but is about a home for unmarried mothers and what went on.

My SM had her son when she was a very young and totally innocent. She kept him but was treated like a skivvy by her older siblings, expected to leave him with her mother to answer to their demands. One sister gave birth to twins expecting them to appear from her navel!

Strange that my SM believed children should not be told anything about how babies are made or how they are born. She was horrified that I had answered my children’s questions as and when they arose - on one occasion in the queue at the supermarket! I was accused of spoiling their innocence.

I was brought up a catholic and have never heard or experienced "churching". Believe me I spent much of my life going to and from church as a child.

The notion that women are unclean is a patriarchal one that is present in several world religions. It's really just basic man made misogyny imo

I've read about the awful goings on at the mother and baby homes in Ireland and saw the film the Magdalene Sisters a few years ago. I went to a convent school and in the main, bar a few exceptions, the nuns that taught us were horrible, they shouldn't have been around children imo. I can only imagine what some of those poor women incarcerated in mother and baby homes experiences were like. There is much emphasis in the catholic church of the rights of the unborn child and in certain instances precious little on the children that are born and in the care of so called religious people. So many suffered at the hands of several religious orders.

It is interesting how the 'older' religions such as Islam, Catholicism, Judaism have an issue with women and reproduction in general. I recognise that this was not just the case with the Catholic church in the 1950s and before, but this particular case is especially chilling. Many on here have previously, and very bravely, described their experiences of having a child out of wedlock in the past.

As Churching is thought to derive from a Jewish purification rite, where the sin of childbirth was washed away I don't think it was always seen as a service of thanks giving B9exchange.

It all part of seeing women as lesser and keeping them in their place

I think it's a little extreme to say none of what happened to women and babies in the RC happened to people of other faiths. Having a child out of wedlock in the early half of the 20th Century was hidden, lied about and a broke the social mores of society. Certainly young women were sent away to have the child and high levels of persuasion use to have the children adopted and there were cases where people later found out their sister was their mother and they had been brought up by grandparents.

It is hard to remember just how stifling societies rules were in the early twentieth century. We have to remember some would still like to impose their rules on their neighbour and that gossip is still, often very destructive. We have to fight to hold the ground we have gained.

The C of E service was to give thanks for mother and child having come through safely, nothing about being unclean, you can read the service here www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/churching-women

For Orthodox Jewish women it seems menstruation itself, not just childbirth, needs a set amount of time for cleansing. www.myjewishlearning.com/article/menstruation-and-family-purity-taharat-ha-mishpacha/

In Islam too, a woman is considered unclean if bleeding. guidelinesislamiclaw.com/menstruation-in-quran-and-hadith/

Some strange male preconception?

B9exchange

The book of Leviticus states a mother is unclean .

Babies were not wrenched from their mothers, the mothers
couldn’t afford to keep herself and a child, her family wouldn’t
help her.

Book of Common Prayer. The Thanksgiving of Women After Childbirth, Commonly called
The Churching of Women.
No mention of sin in the service.

Yes kirkcubbin from what I read, it was the families who sent the girls away, but with pressure from the Catholic church. The government spokesperson said yesterday on the news report that I saw, that everyone was responsible. He is right, in my opinion, and how refreshing to see acceptance of mutual responsibility instead of throwing blame at everyone else. Truly a shameful episode, and in our lifetime too, not an event that we can excuse by being a long time ago/a different time. It is interesting too how the focus was always on the woman, and never the man who made her pregnant. Some of these poor women probably didn't even know how they became pregnant, sex education wasn't high on the agenda in 1950s Catholic Ireland I assume. These children and their mothers didn't even have a decent Christian burial, the words 'sewer system' send a chill.

It wasn't just the Church. The State was complicit too. It was a State/Church partnership. Even now the State is covering up for and protecting the Church.

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.

The Churching of women was not exclusive to Catholic Church and is still offered, not insisted upon, in the Church of England although many will never even come across it. I believe a form of it is available in some churches in the USA also.

It pretty much died out in the 1960/70s. I remember my hackles rising when heard about it and was very keen it stopped! Some Catholic women still go through it too but I imagine you would have to have very conservative views of your religion to do so.

The original reason for being churched changed some time ago and it became a way of giving thanks, like you did Annie.

It was the families who sent the girls away, kircubbin so they would be out of sight as the pregnancy progressed, the babies would be taken away for adoption and no one, apart from the poor distressed young mother, would know any different.

My mam is CofE. She was churched after each of us was born.

I had my first baby in 1979; the wife of my OH's workmate was pregnant around the same time too. During our pregnancies the four of us used to socialise so, when I had my baby, it felt natural to visit her one day when the men folk were at work. I still recall the look of horror on her face when she opened the door and saw me claiming that I couldn't enter her house until I'd been "churched" and my baby baptised!

I swiftly told her that we'd had the christening the previous Sunday, which we had! I'd never heard of churching and my mother and grandmother had never mentioned it either!

As for the Mother and Baby homes........what an absolute disgrace, the "Church" and associated establishments should hang their heads in shame.

I remember relatives being “churched” in the Methodist Church in the 1960s. It was about six weeks after the birth,
They couldn’t attend a service until they had been officially “cleansed”.

It was the families, sex before marriage? shameful, so many daughters were sent to these homes by their parents

I have mixed feelings and tend to look at both sides.

I hear the church are now saying that it was the families who sent the girls away, not the church.

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