Challenge in how we react to babies revelations
The concluding comment to your Editorial (June 11.), captures a challenging prospect for us all. Your appraisal identifies and streamlines several key strands of the unfolding Mother-and-Child travesty, aspiring to drawing up a contextual balance to the fall-out fray : “It would be hypocritical and dishonest to blame only religious orders.”
This, in itself, prompts preliminary caution to any pointing of fingers.
However, the patent awareness of the broad-spectrum societal collusion in all of this still does not exonerate the wider balance of influential probability. True, it was parents, families and communities who deferred to the pervasive pall of implied shame, by consigning their daughters and babies to something of an oblivion of ‘body and soul pain’. But the deeper question which must be asked of the yester-year society is why would such perceived ‘shame’ be so ruthlessly merciless, with no empathic geniality afforded?
Enthusiastic church and religious order aficionados are very keen to rush in with their ameliorating contextualiising, as something of a damage limitation crusade, albeit partially justified as per your own commentary. The reason that all sexuality matters and the chauvinistic disempowerment of women, especially with regard to their reproductive selves, was so repressed, suppressed and ‘depressed’, lies predominantly in the distorted, paranoid and hyper-controlling influence of the Church authorities of that era.
The grim, bleak contingencies visited on innocent folk, both mother and baby, indeed was enacted by family and state alike, but from where did they draw their warped measure or perverse judgement ?
Societies everywhere had undoubtedly some disdainful perspective on so-called ‘illegitimacy’ and ‘loose’ sexual practice. The Irish version just seems to be a tad more intense, brutal and un-Christian by a long shot.
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