IRELAND
Daily Mail
By CATHERINE O’BRIEN
As a teenager in Ireland, Philomena Lee (right) was banished to a convent for the ‘sin’ of having a baby out of wedlock, and forced to give him up. As a major new film about her life is released, she tells Catherine O’Brien about their heartbreaking search for each other.
Philomena Lee lives in a neat semidetached house on a quiet Home Counties street. Inside her sitting room are photographs of her children and grandchildren, and on one wall set slightly apart is a portrait of a handsome man dressed in a pinstriped suit and tie. As he gazes at the camera lens, his smile is warm and open. ‘Every day I think, “If only I could put my arms around him one more time,”’ says Philomena. ‘He looks to me like the type of chap who would have wanted that.’
The man in the photograph is Philomena’s elder son. She named him Anthony and loved him passionately, but she was never allowed to know him. Anthony was born in Ireland in 1952 – a time when the children of unmarried mothers were considered by the Roman Catholic church to be ‘the product of sin’. Disowned by her family for becoming pregnant at the age of 18, Philomena was taken in by nuns who allowed her to see her child for an hour a day. Then, when Anthony was three and a half, he was placed in the back of a car and driven out of her life. ‘In my dreams that moment still comes back to me,’ she says
No one explained fully to Philomena exactly where her son was being taken; she was just told that, as she couldn’t provide a home for him, the church had found a good Catholic family that could. The Mother Superior forced her to sign a pledge of surrender and warned her that she would ‘burn in the fires of hell’ if she ever uttered a word to anyone about her ‘shameful secret’.
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