Our public anger is the incoherent expression of our private shame (Irish Examiner)

[theHandpuppet]

Fascinating article.

Irish Examiner
Our public anger is the incoherent expression of our private shame
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
By Gerard Howlin

IN Ireland there are particular circumstances feeding the recurring frenzies of first using nuns as guardians of female sexuality, and then turning on them for doing just that.

Post-famine Ireland, the development of a large Catholic class of smallholders and a smaller catholic middle class, was rooted in social insecurity and the craving for respectability. The norms of what is socially respectable have changed, but the craving remains unabated. The outburst of anger, the running of rhetoric ahead of facts, is as much a recoiling from the horror of ourselves as any love of justice — least of all for the afflicted.

The repetitive episodes of first handing over unmarried pregnant women into the ‘care’ of women religious, the employment, and then excoriation of those same women religious are part of a continuing theme. It has deep-rooted, but not extinct echoes, of a centuries old treatment of women who through their economic independence, social isolation or sexual apostasy, challenged the norm.

Seeing the differences, without understanding the similarities, between the nuns who managed mother and baby homes, and the women who were put into them, is to read history backwards. It is the means for a socially insecure, vindictive society to isolate and punish errant women. ‘Witch-hunt’ recalls a craze, but only partly that, where women, overwhelmingly ones isolated from appropriate male authority, were picked off and punished. The unmarried and the widowed were far more likely to be accused. Their lack of appendage to a man, affronted and unsettled people. It left them vulnerable to the phobias of a surrounding society and the recurring need for vengeance we are so familiar with now....

MORE at http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/gerard-howlin/our-public-anger-is-the-incoherent-expression-of-our-private-shame-271620.html

[bpj62]

1. My Father

These are the times when I wish my father was still alive so I could ask him what he knew about these homes. He was born in Cork Ireland in 1929 and he left in 1956. As a young man I was always aware of the many women who had children but did not have a father around and what I found out was that divorce was illegal in Ireland until just recently so many of these women had just moved on with their lives. The Catholic Church is so interwoven into the history of Ireland both good and bad and this discovery may be the straw that forces the people and the government to look at the church in a different light.

[redqueen]

2. Excellent article, thank you for sharing it here.

This is particularly poignant:

The irony is that while an inquiry will properly focus on the role of the religious, it will hardly investigate the role of families who committed the majority of women into those same places. Wider reflection on the role of the surrounding society, in prompting or compelling those families, will likely not happen in the context of any likely inquiry.