Saturday, August 3, 2013

Dutch Women who Sleep with Priests (6 of 7): Story of a Woman.



From Tineke Ferwerda’s “Sister Philothea: Relationships between Women and Roman Catholic Priests” (1989; translated 1993) (p. 165; paragraph breaks added for clarity):

I must now think back to the 1950s, when I was working in a home for unmarried mothers.  I did the administration as an assistant to the social worker.  One of my jobs was to put all the facts on file.  Even at that time, when no one dared to think about it, let alone talk about it, girls were being admitted who had been made pregnant by a priest.

At this time the tendency was also to make unmarried mothers give up the child they expected.  These women were put under pressure and received no guidance.

I often involuntarily think back to this, all the more since ten years later I saw some of these women back as patients in the psychiatric institution where I was working as a counsellor [sic]...

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