A very crude past

The Catholic church sold my
child
Unmarried mother Philomena Lee was
forced to give up her son to Irish nuns,
who sold him on to rich Americans. For
decades she tried to find him. A chance
meeting with Martin Sixsmith eventually
uncovered the truth
It began with a chance encounter at a
New Year's party in 2004. I was trying to
leave, but a woman said she had a
message for me. She knew I had been a
journalist and she had a friend who
wanted my help to solve a family
mystery. I agreed to a meeting, and
found myself embarking on a five-year
quest for a man I had never met.
The woman's friend was called Jane, a
financial administrator from St Albans.
She was in her late 30s and had been
through an emotional experience. Just
before Christmas, her mother,
Philomena, tipsy on festive sherry, had
revealed a secret she had kept for 50
years – she had a son she had never
mentioned to anyone.
Jane said her lost brother would be in his
early 50s and probably living in America.
The reason for the secrecy was that he
had been born outside of marriage in
Ireland at a time when such things were
considered shameful.
A little later I met Philomena herself. She
told me she had given birth in a country
convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary
on 5 July 1952. She was 18 when she met
a young man who bought her a toffee
apple on a warm autumn evening at the
county fair. "I had just left convent
school," she said with an air of wistful
regret. "I went in there when my mother
died, when I was six and a half, and I left
at 18 not knowing a thing about the facts
of life. I didn't know where babies came
from ... "
When her pregnancy became obvious,
her family had Philomena "put away"
with the nuns. After her baby, Anthony,
was born, the mother superior
threatened Philomena with damnation if
ever she breathed a word about her
"guilty secret". Terrified, she kept it quiet
for more than half a century. "All my life
I couldn't tell anyone. We were so
browbeaten, it was such a sin. It was an
awful thing to have a baby out of
wedlock ... Over the years I would say 'I
will tell them, I will tell them' but it was
so ingrained deep down in my heart that
I mustn't tell anybody, that I never did."
I was intrigued to know why the nuns
had been so insistent on the importance
of silence and secrecy. The answer,
almost certainly, lay in what had
happened next.
Philomena was one of thousands of Irish
women sent to convents in the 1950s and
60s, taken away from their homes and
families because the Catholic church said
single mothers were moral degenerates
who could not be allowed to keep their
children.
Such was the power of the church, and
of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid,
that the state bowed before its demands,
ceding responsibility for the mothers and
babies to the nuns. For them it was not
only a matter of sin and morality, but
one of pounds, shillings and pence. At
the time young Anthony Lee was born, I
discovered that the Irish government was
paying the Catholic church a pound a
week for every woman in its care, and
two shillings and sixpence for every
baby. And that was not all.
After giving birth, the girls were allowed
to leave the convent only if they or their
family could pay the nuns £100. It was a
substantial sum, and those who couldn't
afford it – the vast majority – were kept
in the convent for three years, working
in kitchens, greenhouses and laundries
or making rosary beads and religious
artefacts, while the church kept the
profits from their labour.
Even crueller than the work was the fact
that mothers had to care for their
children, developing maternal ties and
affection that were to be torn asunder at
the end of their three-year sentence. Like
all the other girls, Philomena Lee was
made to sign a renunciation document
agreeing to give up her three-year-old
son and swearing on oath: "I relinquish
full claim for ever to my child and
surrender him to Sister Barbara,
Superioress of Sean Ross Abbey. The
purpose is to enable Sister Barbara to
make my child available for adoption to
any person she considers fit and proper,
inside or outside the state. I further
undertake never to attempt to see,
interfere with or make any claim to the
said child at any future time."
Philomena says she fought against
signing the terrible undertaking. "Oh
God, my heart. I didn't want him to go. I
just craved and begged them to please let
me keep him. None of us wanted to give
our babies up, none of us. But what else
could we do? They just said, 'You have to
sign these papers.'
"I remember it was a Sunday evening ...
I'm so sorry, I'm crying now when I think
about it ... "
Philomena cried when Anthony was
taken from her at Christmas, 1955. She
was not told he was going or allowed to
say goodbye, but she spotted him being
bundled into the back of a black car.
When she shouted to him, the noise of
the engine drowned out her voice, but as
the car pulled away she is convinced that
he stood up and peered through the rear
windscreen looking for her.
Afterwards, her father would not take
her back because of the shame: he had
told friends, neighbours and Philomena's
sisters that she had gone away and no
one knew where she was. So in the end
the church dispatched her to work at one
of its homes for delinquent boys in
Liverpool.
Philomena trained as a nurse, got
married in 1959 and had two more
children. She longed to tell them about
their lost brother, but couldn't. She kept
her secret but never forgot her son. "Oh
he was gorgeous," she told me. "He was a
lovely, gentle, quiet lad. All my life I have
never forgotten him. I would so often
say, 'I wonder what he is doing? Has he
gone to Vietnam? Is he on skid row?' I
just didn't know what had happened to
him ... "
Finally, without telling anyone,
Philomena embarked on a lonely,
desperate search to find him. She went
back to the convent in Roscrea several
times between 1956 and 1989 and asked
the nuns to help her. Each time they
refused, brandishing her sworn
undertaking that she would "never
attempt to see" her child.
When I agreed to help look for Anthony
in 2004, we had little to go on. We knew
his date and place of birth, but his name
would certainly have been changed by
his adoptive parents. Philomena had
been told her son would be taken to the
US, but little else.
Early on in the search I realised that the
Irish Catholic hierarchy had been
engaged in what amounted to an illicit
baby trade. From the end of the second
world war until the 1970s, it considered
the thousands of souls born in its care to
be the church's own property. With or
without the agreement of their mothers,
it sold them to the highest bidder. Every
year, hundreds were shipped off to
American couples who paid
"donations" (in reality, fees) to the nuns.
Few if any checks were made on the
suitability of the adopting families – the
only condition laid down by Archbishop
McQuaid was that they should be
practising Catholics.
When rumours of the church's role
began to emerge decades later, much of
the incriminating paperwork disappeared
in unexplained circumstances, and even
today the church guards its adoption
archives fiercely. It took a painstaking
trawl through passport records and the
piecing together of fleeting references in
old newspaper articles to discover what
had become of Anthony Lee ...
Doc and Marge Hess from St Louis,
Missouri fulfilled the McQuaid criteria –
they were good Catholics, a professional
couple in their early 40s, and Marge's
brother was a bishop. The Hesses already
had three sons, but they wanted a
daughter. In the course of my research, I
came into possession of Marge Hess's
diaries and was able to trace her
innermost thoughts as she flew to
Ireland in August 1955 to scour the
church's mother and baby homes for a
little girl. I read her first impressions of
the shy three-year-old, Mary McDonald,
who was offered to her by the mother
superior of the Roscrea convent. And I
discovered the twist of fate that led her
to adopt Anthony Lee.
When Marge leaned down to pick up her
new daughter in the convent nursery,
she was charmed to see Mary's best
friend, a little boy in baggy trousers,
come running to give her a kiss. She fell
for him at once. That evening she called
her husband in St Louis and asked if it
would be OK to bring two children back
instead of one.
Anthony's spontaneous show of affection
for Marge changed his life. By the end of
1955, he and Mary had been transported
from rural Ireland to a new existence
and new identities. He was renamed
Michael Hess and grew up to be an A
student. He was physically attractive and
gifted, ran cross-country and sang in
school musical productions. But he was
haunted by half-remembered visions of
his first three years in Ireland and by a
lifelong yearning to find his mother.
Separated by fate, mother and child
spent decades looking for each other,
repeatedly thwarted by the refusal of the
nuns to reveal information, each of them
unaware that the other was also yearning
and searching.
Michael became a successful lawyer. As a
rising star of the Republican National
Committee, he masterminded the party's
electoral strategy, brokering the
redistricting (gerrymandering) reforms
that kept them in power for more than a
decade. When George Bush Sr became
president, he made Mike his chief legal
counsel.
But Michael Hess was gay. He was
obliged to conceal his sexuality in a party
that was rabidly homophobic. He was
tormented by the double life he was
forced to lead and by the fact that his
work was entrenching in power a party
that victimised his friends and lovers.
He was tormented, too, by the absence of
his mother and by the orphan's sense of
helplessness: he didn't know where he
came from, didn't know who he was or
how he should live. He felt unloved by
his adoptive father and brothers; he felt
guilt over his sexuality and he had a
series of stormy relationships. A spurned
lover burned himself to death because
Mike rejected him.
But he was loved by his adoptive mother
and by the little girl who was plucked
with him from the Roscrea convent who
became his lifelong friend and sister. He
found some happiness in a long-term
relationship with a caring, loving partner.
But he could never be at peace. He went
back to Roscrea, first in 1977 and again in
1993, to plead with the nuns to tell him
how to find his mother. They turned him
away.
On his return to the US, he plunged into
alcohol, drugs and unbridled sexual
indulgence. His behaviour brought with
it the terrible fear of exposure that
would destroy him as a senior
Republican official, but he could not stop
himself. On one of his lost weekends he
became infected with HIV.
He and Pete, his long-term partner,
agonised over their future. Pete stood by
him, but Michael's health began to
deteriorate. Fearing the worst, they flew
to Roscrea in 1993 to make an emotional
appeal to the nuns ... but still they
refused to tell him where he could find
his mother, or indeed that her sisters and
brother – his aunts and uncle – were
living just a few miles down the road.
In desperation, Mike asked the mother
superior if he could at least be buried in
the convent if he were to die: he would
put enough information on his
gravestone to help his mother find out
about his life "if ever she comes looking
for me". As we know – but Mike did not –
Philomena was looking for him,
returning to Roscrea, seeking traces of
her son ...
Obituaries in US newspapers after
Michael's death in August 1995 provided
vital clues in my search for him. The
hunt for Michael took me through state
and church archives, through adoption
agencies, American university records
and Republican party sources before it
led to the end of the trail and the story's
poignant, unexpected conclusion. It
threw up a Hardyesque tale of
coincidences and missed connections,
and a powerful indictment of two
historical eras: 1950s Ireland and 1980s
America.
In addition to Mike and Philomena's
quest, I discovered the thousands of
other lost "orphans" whose lives were
changed for ever by the greed and
hypocrisy of church and state. Like
Michael, many of them are still looking
for their parents and, through them, for
their identity.
Now in her 70s, and five years after
visiting her son's grave for the first time,
Philomena is remarkably devoid of
bitterness. She has started to go to mass
again. But she blames herself for
everything, for giving her son away and
for not speaking out about him earlier,
when things could have been different:
"If only, if only. I curse myself every time
I think of it. If only I'd mentioned it all
those years ago, maybe he wouldn't ... Oh
Lord, it makes my heart ache! I'm sure
there are lots of women to this very day
– they're the same as me; they haven't
said anything.
"It is the biggest regret of my life and I
have to bear that. It is my own fault and
now it is my woe."
T