I was watching it with Josh and Ben. And finding it hard to compute that only a dozen years before I was born unmarried mothers were being forced to work in Irish laundries and shut away in religious orders, their babies being given up for adoption and sometimes even sold, never to be seen again. It feels as though its something which should belong to ancient history. But it happened in my lifetime - and the consequences are still being experienced today. All those children sent to Australia for ' a better life' after the war. The thing that struck me again yesterday as I watched the film was that in all these cases of terrible abuse and injustice people thought they were doing the right thing.
What was it about some religious institutions of the fifties and sixties ( both Catholic and Protestant) which made people think it was God's will that sinful behaviour was punished so brutally? Where was the notion of love and forgiveness and redemption and restitution? We look back now and are horrified by the thought that anyone could have thought it was a good idea to separate babies from their mothers or to hide someone away just because they were pregnant. But the nuns and clerics and children's home owners and doctors and adoption agencies all thought they were in the right, doing the best thing, and acting justly and fairly. Within fifty years opinions have shifted radically and now we look back with shame.
There are two issues which come to mind with regards to all this.
1) have we learned the lessons of the past and
2) has the pendulum swung too far in the direction of tolerance of sin
As a society we have always been pretty good at persecuting ' sinners'. In the film Philomena it was unmarried young girls who got pregnant. For a good part of the 20th century it was homosexuals. During the war it was pacifists, deserters and those who were mentally ill. People have been criminalised, horribly punished, sterilised and even shot in the name of 'doing the right thing' . But, I hear you say, that was then. We wouldnt behave like that now. We know better. But do we? Really? Don't we still fear and misunderstand and mistreat the mentally ill? Don't we turn our backs on the homeless and blame the addicted for bringing their problems on themselves.? Doesn't the church still struggle to accept the unmarried mother, the co-habiting couple, the gay and the divorced/divorcing. ? I wonder if we will look back on the 2000's with the same sense of disbelief and shame as we look back on aspects of the fifties and sixties.
On the other hand.....
In our scramble to atone for the harsh judgementalism of the past have we become so lax and laissez faire that we have lost all sense of moral rectitude and the notion of sin being something serious which separates us from God and put Jesus on the cross? In a society where everyone is terrified of standing up to be counted or saying that anything is definitively wrong, does the church not have a job to do? Are we not to hold up the Word and say ' this is the way walk in it' ? Do we not still preach the ten commandments and tell the world that they are sinners in need of a saviour? There is a fine line to tread here and it bothers me greatly all the time that I and that the church in general, might not be getting it right.
The bottom line is that we are to preach the gospel - tell people that they are sinners, that they can be saved by grace and that God loves them. The people who need to hear that most are the ones we keep out of our churches because we find it easier to judge than accept them. It is not our job to judge. We can not convict people of their sin or change their hearts or their lifestyles. That's God's job. And He is really good at it. All we need to do is bring people into an environment where they can meet Him. And pray for them. These days we welcome unmarried teenagers and their babies into our congregations and offer them love and support whilst at the same time encouraging them to bring their relationships and their lifestyles under God. Let's also do that for the alcoholic and the drug addict , the adulterer and the gambler, the schizophrenic and the transitioning.
And let's apologise where we have turned people away from God by our attitudes. The lovely thing about Philomena Lee is that she never let go of the God who loved her and was able to finally get her closure when she met the Pope in 2014
;http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/06/steve-coogan-pope-francis-philomena-lee
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