Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

STEPHEN FREARS – PHILOMENA – 2013

That’s a film from our time and our continent, from Ireland for sure but it could be from many other places in this world. The Celtic harp is the key to the story.

Like all testimonies of some past horror, after seeing it, after being told about it, no one can really say anything coherent about the drama they have just witnessed.

Did that girl who had been entrusted to a nunnery for her education and had fallen into some carnal attraction deserve the severe punishment of dying in labor because the nuns did not provide her with any medical help, or deserve the punishment of seeing her own child be adopted away for a big sum of money from some rich Americans, or deserve the revenge of these nuns who refuse fifty years later to give her any indication about her son, and even lie to this mother in her old age and her lifelong repentance?

If it were only one girl, we would say there was something wrong with her, but when there were always a dozen of girls in the same situation practically permanently in that nunnery, you can wonder what was wrong with this institution that could not educate these girls into some prudence and care about what they did. There sure was something wrong since they did not inform the girls of the danger of having sex on the wild side of the moon, and they did not provide the girls with any protection, of course not we are Catholic and we are in 1952, in other words in the Middle Ages, and we have to keep in mind the Catholic church, in spite of its recently promoted Pope, still advocates some hostility against any protection at all, and of course against abortion, which should never have to be performed if all precautions had been taken before, provided the teenagers were informed about these dangers and these protections.

Was that cultivated ignorance a way to keep a dozen of adoptable children in constant availability for the parents who were ready to provide the nunnery with a wealthy income? Was that nunnery a nursery of orphans to be sold to the highest bidders?

We have to keep in mind that contraception was liberated only twenty or thirty years after World War II in many western countries, and is still not common in many countries today, even when the law has made it legal. A shortage is so easily organized in this market economy.

So is it the fault of Ireland who was thinking of many other problems including a civil war and did not even thought of women’s rights? Is it the fault of the nuns who were totally engulfed in an ideology that made sex a sin and carnal desire a crime? Is it the fault of the Catholic church that was and still is in many ways tied up in some medieval beliefs? And is this Catholic church the only culprit in this world on that crime against humanity that uses sex to crush people down and keep them in some kind of mental slavery? Are other religions and fundamentalist ethics better on that subject?

We are confronted to a drama that happened in one situation but similar dramas happened in many other situations, orphanages or simple homelessness and neglect, and are still happening, including the abduction of millions of children every year, sold by their parents on not, ending up in global prostitution, which seems to be so profitable in the countries where it is economically accounted for and financially registered. Who is responsible if not the human mind that seems to just start being able today in wider and wider zones in the world to understand that individual freedom is the condition to individual success and that common success cannot be reached in any society when individuals are not free enough to excel.

That’s what this film made me sad about: history is going so slow at times. And yet I am not that sad after all because history seems to be going slightly faster in the present period than it used to go before 1945. And yet has the world changed really? And will it really ever reach a proper general and global level of acceptability?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU