3.3.3.3 Protection of the Institution of the Family

After the discussion on one-way knowledge flow I will now look at the phenomenon of the protection of the institution of the family.

Over the past number of decades in Ireland we have examined ourselves, usually very critically, in respect of how our Government, in times past, handed over care of vulnerable children and adults to Catholic religious orders. There are a lot of different reports arising from such examinations if you have the time and inclination to Google the subject.

Almost always, these vulnerable children and adults (and I would class a vulnerable adult in those days, to be a young unmarried woman who was pregnant) were in families that were experiencing varying levels of suffering.

Like the Sub-Chapter in a previous Section, A Little Bit Of History, I believe that it would be useful, for our awareness, to explore our recent history of caring for vulnerable people in Ireland – from the point of view of alleviation of suffering – and away from the media’s tendency to sensationalise it all.

Allied to that it might be interesting (and relevant) to explore the cultural roots of our elected Governments handing over so much power to the Church.

For over two centuries, the Catholic Church has controlled primary and secondary education in Ireland – so necessary for propagation of values from generation to generation. Up to very recently it also controlled our health system.

This control of health and education (mostly by religious orders – but also through parish priests and bishops having influential positions on the boards of schools and hospitals) began when we were still under English rule.

The ruling classes in England (and their equivalents in Ireland – the infamous landlords – with the exception of a few with a social conscience) were utterly neglectful of ordinary Irish Catholics in these two vital areas, indeed they impoverished our country to the point where we starved to death and emigrated in large numbers in the mid to late 1840’s and the decades following.

I remember a kind and compassionate Christian Brother explaining to us that when no one (and he meant no-one) educated poor Catholic Irish children, in the early 19^th Century, brothers and nuns took up the challenge.

I thought, at that time, as we were young men going out into the world, that he was kind of trying to get us to understand and then forgive the hurt that his colleagues might have visited on us.  The school where he was teaching, (and I was supposed to be learning) Sexton St. Christian Brothers School in Limerick, had been founded in 1816. 

Many of the brothers – I am fairly sure – went into the religious life when they were very young (as teenagers) and were totally unprepared for the stresses of the religious life itself, e.g. vows of poverty, obedience, celibacy etc., not to mention the pressures that we now know come from caring for vulnerable people.

I cannot say that his explanation totally erased the memories of what was called corporal punishment, but I remember, as a young man doing the Leaving Cert, appreciating his honesty – and on reflection it was quite courageous of him to broach such subjects in those days.

We must assume that the Church was (at least initially) motivated by genuine generosity of spirit in its desire to educate and heal those who no-one else looked out for.

However over many decades the early generosity of spirit morphed into a power and control (and even economic) exercise to the extent that, after independence in 1922, the Catholic Church deemed their law (Canon Law) to be on an equal footing (if not superior) to the law of the land as determined by our democratically elected Governments.

And those Governments, national and local, at every level from the highest office down to the lowliest county councillor, were under the thumb of the Catholic Church. The same went for our principal sporting organisation, the GAA.  Priests were involved in many clubs and many were managers of county teams.  The Archbishop of Cashel threw in the ball on All-Ireland Final Days, (after the opposing captains kissed his ring) and the principal GAA stadium, Croke Park, is named after an Archbishop.

Our Proclamation of Independence in 1916 promised a pluralist society and equality for all, and was declared in the name of God.  Our 1937 Constitution, voted for overwhelmingly by the ordinary people, also mentions God and the primacy of the protection of different aspects of family life – as I will describe in the next post. Even one of our most famous patriotic songs, The Foggy Dew – written by a priest – afforded the Angelus higher status in our fight for freedom than the pipes and drums that most armies rely on for keeping up morale!

When I was young even music/dancing and entertainment was organised by clergy, and if my memory serves me right a local (and highly successful) Limerick rock band, Reform was managed by a priest. I remember thinking, growing up, if it was named after an Irish patriot or a saint, it must be either a GAA Club or a Local Authority Housing Estate. And the Church also boosted the fishing industry as they forbade eating meat on Fridays.

Of equal interest is how the average Irish Catholic became dependent on, and indeed, clung to the Church.  This dependence was, I am sure, driven by firstly the need to be educated and healed (and even fed and clothed in some cases) when no one else was doing it, and secondly (and equally importantly) the need to have a strong identity that was different to that of the perceived oppressors and their equivalents in the houses of the gentry in Ireland. The fact that we were an island also was a factor, as outside influences took a much longer time to take hold than they do nowadays.

While the Catholic Church is not as central to us Irish now, those examples are an illustration of the extent to which we saw Ireland and The Catholic Church, and being Irish and Catholic, as being one and the same, like, nowadays, Iran is an Islamic State, or Israel is a Jewish State.

Of relevance to us is that, with virtually full control of our lives from conception to death, one of the biggies of the Catholic Church was the protection of the integrity of family life.

Pictures of the Holy Family; Mary, Joseph and Jesus, had a revered place in the kitchens of our Catholic homes. I often wondered, (when I became old enough to wonder about such matters) how the ideal Irish Catholic Family consisted of 8, 9, or 10 or even more children in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, while Mary and Joseph got away with having only one. In the 1960’s, the picture of the Holy Family was joined by a picture of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy – another family that obviously had some sort of ideal status for us Irish Catholics at that time.

I don’t remember anyone ever telling me why the Church protected and championed family life with such vigour.  It just did!  I probably guessed (if I thought about it at all) that it was because the Pope, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers knew that the traditional family of two parents of opposite sex who were happy together, joined by a number of children, was a place that would optimise the inculcation and then the perpetuation of honourable and positive (and, of course, Catholic) values in children, as they grew up in an atmosphere of safety, warmth, and security.

And because they said so – and it, kind of, made sense – I believed it.

While I am not going to examine how faithful the plain people of Ireland were to this ideal, it is true that many families thrived under the blueprint for living laid down by the Catholic Church that met all our spiritual, educational, medical and even dietary, (no meat on certain dates/days), social and sporting needs.

However a major down-side to granting the family such high status was that it became common to protect the institution of the family (and parents and the institution of Catholic marriage) at all costs when something went wrong.

I do not think that Ireland is unique here.  Even in best-case scenarios, anywhere in the world, parents will often be defensive about their methods of child-rearing, discipline, how the quality of their relationship affects their children’s well-being and growth, how their busy-ness might be harmful to relationship building, and many other factors. 

When a powerful entity such as the Catholic Church protects this natural (almost default) defensiveness rather than encouraging genuine enquiry, it is easy to see how external (and usually quick fix) solutions, i.e. solutions outside the family, were always favoured over the much greater challenge of internal enquiry.

So a very strong (almost unassailable) belief grew that suffering in a family could be eased (and problems could be solved) without upsetting the status quo within the institution – and without acknowledgment of what I will call non-surface-evident reasons.

And in doing this, parents’ (and other family members’) sufferings were alleviated and professionals’ consciences were salved.

Two examples are given below to illustrate how, in our Irish culture, the institution of the family was defended at all costs even up to a few short decades ago. 

I will set the examples in the context of people suffering, as avoidance of suffering is a very powerful motivator for many of our decisions and subsequent actions.

First Example

The first example is of a young unmarried woman of, say, 17 becoming pregnant in an ordinary Irish family in the 1950’s.  The young woman informs her parents that she is pregnant and she may or may not disclose the identity of the prospective baby’s father.  The parents, after they get over the shock, seek the advice of the local clergy and a decision is made that the young woman will be sent to a mother and baby home and that she will immediately give up the baby for adoption at birth.

In the context of people suffering:

~ Her parents’ suffering, brought on by the shame that is likely to result from a baby born with no legal status, (that is, illegitimately) is eased by the young woman giving up the baby for adoption.

~ The suffering of parents who cannot have a baby through natural means is eased by being afforded the possibility of having a baby through adoption.

~ The suffering of the parents of the man who had sex with the 17 year old young woman is also alleviated as their son does not have to carry the stigma of being the father of an illegitimate child (if they know about it at all).

~ The man’s own suffering is (probably) also eased greatly as he can get on with his life without the burden of having to be married – assuming that he is an unmarried young man! (Of course I am aware that the father could be an older married man, perhaps a man of prominence in the community, a man within the girl’s family, or a stranger who will never be seen again).

~ The clergy’s potential suffering is avoided by the maintenance of their all powerful position in respect of family values.

And, in addition to the easing of suffering:

~ The religious order gains financially.  (This has been revealed in recent enquiries but I don’t think that it was generally known at the time).

~ One way knowledge flow kicks in as all the people who are powerful in the young woman’s life determine what is good for her but she is not allowed have an opinion as to what might be good for her.

~ This is such a win-win situation for everyone involved that the potential suffering of the young woman and the baby is not factored in at all.

Indeed, it is assumed that:

~ The baby will not suffer long term because he will forget everything anyway, and

~ The young woman is happy to be relieved of the complications of having a child outside of marriage and all that went with it in those days.

Second Example

The second example is that of a 13-14 year old boy being cheeky in school, stealing from his parents, then shops, and getting into fights on the street.  Despite warnings from his teacher and his father, accompanied, perhaps by physical punishment, the boy continues to behave in a way that is unacceptable to the adults in his life.  Eventually the involvement of the Guards leads a judge supported by clergy and possibly the local GP to send him to a special school, known as an Industrial school, or Reformatory run by a religious order where his behaviour will be corrected so that he will never steal again – and will get an education so that he will be able to get a job when he grows up.

~ Once again, the suffering of the parents, teachers, neighbours, and local shopkeepers is alleviated as the boy is taken away, i.e. the problem disappears.

~ Parents, Guards, the judge and the religious orders know better than the boy himself what is good for him – one-way knowledge flow.

~ There is no attempt at reflection into the dynamics within the family or the needs of the boy that might be a factor in his oppositional or anti-social behaviour.

~ Nor is there any attempt to involve the boy himself in the solution.

~ Nor, crucially, is there a genuine attempt to encourage the parents to hold the boy’s suffering as he makes sense of the world through finding his own voice.

~ And, it is assumed that there will be a positive outcome – the boy will see the error of his ways and grow up to be a responsible well-educated adult.

There are many more examples that could be given of what would nowadays be considered to be the human rights of vulnerable people who are suffering being forfeited so that the suffering of more powerful people can be eased without 1): challenging the status, norms, values etc. of the parents and/or the family in general and/or 2): encouraging the parents to hold the suffering of their children instead of handing over responsibility to an external entity.

These examples span mental illness, criminal behaviour, orphanages, addiction, and similar areas. Some of these solutions caused significant problems for society as I will describe in the next post.

As people of my generation (I was born in 1952) look back nostalgically now, we may observe a correlation between the strict mother and baby homes, the excessively punitive reformatories, corporal punishment in schools, and the very low crime rate that we had in Ireland in the black and white 1950’s and 1960’s when I was growing up.

While these practices appeared to solve problems quickly at that time, we had no idea what social, emotional and indeed financial problems we were creating for later generations.

An aspect of both solutions is that the all-powerful religious, medical, legal, educational, political, academic, community, media and I’d say even sporting institutions that ran our country (the Pillars of the time) thought that it was totally acceptable that the institution of the family was protected while the solutions, (that nowadays would probably be deemed to be unhelpful, if not wrong by most people), were implemented.

In fact, such were the forces supporting these courses of action that it would have been almost impossible for anyone to be critical.  And anyone who did would have got short shrift from the Pillars.  And to cap it all, it was both (short-term) cost-effective and convenient for successive Governments – saving money and avoiding confrontation with the Catholic Church at the same time.

To complicate it even further, it actually did work in some situations where young women’s suffering was eased by giving up their babies for adoption, children were happy and thrived with adoptive parents, and some young wayward boys’ behaviour was altered for the better, learning a trade and going on to be responsible autonomous adults.

I know – I’ve met them!

But I have also met women and men who, when young, did not display receptiveness and acceptance to one-way knowledge flow, who resisted every attempt to correct their behaviour, who yearned for someone to understand them, and who ended up in prison, mental asylums, powerless, and, in some cases, choosing suicide as an option to end the long years of suffering that first began at a very young age when they behaved in a way that was unacceptable to their parents, family members, teachers and other people of influence in their world.

Have a look at the list below, what I will call quick fix solutions (which I already mentioned briefly in a footnote at the bottom of this post) all supported by the establishment in the past in Ireland, some of which survive to this day:

~ Mental asylums where people were committed for years and years if not decades or their entire life. (And I ask here how many people were diagnosed as having a psychiatric illness because they didn’t conform to what their family expected of them)?

~ Mother and baby homes where young women went to have babies for adoption, mentioned in the previous post.

~ Places of detention for young children, known as Industrial Schools, or Reformatories, also mentioned in the previous post.

~ Prisons, where, in addition to people who have committed crimes, mentally ill people or even people with disabilities were sent.

~ Schools where violence to children (also known as corporal punishment) was allowed and even encouraged.

~ Lobotomies where surgeons operated on the brain by drilling holes into it to heal schizophrenia and other conditions.

~ Dispensing massive amounts of drugs in prisons or mental asylums in desperate attempts to change inmates’ behaviour for the better.

~ Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) which involved giving mentally ill patients electric shocks in the hope that it would cure them.

~ Leaching of blood.

~ And for those of more exotic beliefs, exorcism, witches’ spells, etc.

~ Various flavours of the month [1] that occasionally come knocking!

It was usual, in such quick-fixes that:

1. The person being fixed was almost always a passive recipient rather than an active participant in his/her healing.

2. The family had peripheral involvement, or sometimes no involvement at all in how the fixing took place.

Well so much for history …..  I will ponder on what is happening in the present day in the next Sub-Chapter.

[1]. As falling in love is a quick fix of sorts in our lives, and involves temporary denial of reality, I propose that the Pillars sometimes fall in love with shiny, new, quick-fix ideas that sound good.  This temporarily suspends reality but in a short time when reality asserts itself again it is obvious that quick-fix was a false dawn and it is forgotten about as quickly as it appeared!