by Robert Thompson
For generations, children born outside marriage were labelled with a single cruel word: bastard. The word appeared in law, in official documents, in school playgrounds, in churches, and in everyday speech. It carried shame. It marked people out as somehow less legitimate, less worthy, less respectable than others. The shame fell upon the child. It fell upon the mother. It almost never fell upon the institutions that created and enforced the stigma.
This week Archbishop Sarah Mullally apologised on behalf of the Church of England for its role in the mother-and-baby homes and adoption practices that caused profound suffering to women and children throughout the twentieth century. The apology was both necessary and welcome. Yet one phrase in particular caught my attention. She spoke of a culture that valued “secrecy and respectability” over compassion and care.
As someone who grew up in Ireland, I immediately recognised those words. Because secrecy and respectability were not accidental features of the system. They were the system. Women who became pregnant outside marriage were treated as problems to be hidden. Families were encouraged to keep silent. Children were separated from mothers. Records disappeared. Lives were permanently altered. All in the name of protecting reputations. Not the reputations of the women. Not the reputations of the children. The reputations of families, churches and institutions.
The children were called bastards. Yet looking back now, we are bound to ask a difficult question. Who was really responsible for the shame? The mothers did not create it. The children certainly did not create it. The shame was manufactured and enforced by institutions that claimed moral authority whilst denying compassion to some of the most vulnerable people in society. If there were moral failures in this story, they belonged not to the babies born outside marriage but to the systems that judged them, stigmatised them and separated them from those who loved them.
That is why Archbishop Mullally’s words carry significance far beyond the events of the past. When she speaks of secrecy and respectability, she is identifying a recurring institutional temptation: the temptation to protect reputation rather than people; to preserve authority rather than listen to those who have been harmed; to manage scandal rather than confront truth.
And that is why many survivors of contemporary safeguarding failures will read her words and experience an uncomfortable sense of recognition. The Church now condemns a culture that prioritised institutional reputation over vulnerable people. But that is precisely the criticism many survivors make of the Church today.
Time and again we hear concerns about delayed investigations, unpublished reports, defensive institutional cultures, failures of accountability and a reluctance to admit mistakes. Survivors speak of not being listened to, not being believed, or being treated as risks to institutional reputation rather than people deserving justice and compassion. Of course, there are many dedicated safeguarding professionals and church leaders working tirelessly to change this culture. Progress has been made and important reforms have taken place. Yet the underlying question remains. If secrecy and respectability were among the sins of the Church’s past, are we entirely certain they are not also among the sins of its present?
The tragedy of institutional failure is that it often becomes obvious only in retrospect. Today we ask how previous generations could have failed to see the suffering caused by mother-and-baby homes. How could they not have known? How could they not have listened? How could they have placed institutional reputation above human dignity? Yet future generations may one day ask exactly the same questions about us. What did the Church know about safeguarding failures? What did it do? Who was listened to? Who was ignored? Who was protected?
The Christian tradition has a word for the response required in such circumstances: repentance. But repentance is more than apology. When Zacchaeus encounters Christ, he does not simply say sorry. He restores what has been lost. Biblical repentance is practical. It seeks repair. It seeks restitution. It seeks justice.
That raises an important question following this week’s apology. What does redress look like?
Recent criticism from the Adult Adoptee Movement suggests that this question is not merely theoretical. Responding to the Archbishop’s apology, adoptee representatives argued that they had been excluded from shaping the process itself. Their criticism was simple but profound: “An apology about us, without us, is not accountability.”
More troubling still, some adoptees have suggested that they felt unable to participate in the Church’s engagement process because it did not feel safe. They point to meetings that included professionals and prospective adopters in circumstances where adoptees themselves felt unable to speak openly about their experiences. Whether or not one accepts every aspect of that critique, it points towards a central principle of genuine repentance. Those who have suffered harm cannot simply be the recipients of an apology. They must be participants in shaping the response. And if people affected by historic harms do not feel safe enough to participate, the Church must ask itself some difficult questions about the culture of its present-day processes as well as the failures of its past.
If the Church accepts responsibility for the harms experienced by women and children caught up in these systems, what practical acts of repair follow? Will there be assistance with tracing records and reconnecting families? Will there be counselling and therapeutic support? Will there be memorialisation and public recognition? Will there be financial compensation where harm can be demonstrated? Will survivors themselves help shape the response?
These are not easy questions. But they are necessary ones. The Church must be careful not to create the impression that apologies are for the institution’s benefit while justice remains the responsibility of survivors to pursue alone. Nor can the Church assume that an apology is survivor-centred simply because survivors are consulted; the deeper question is whether they share in shaping the response and whether they experience the process itself as safe, respectful and trustworthy.
The lesson of the mother-and-baby homes is not simply that terrible things happened in the past. The lesson is that institutions can become so concerned with secrecy and respectability that they lose sight of the people they exist to serve.
Archbishop Mullally’s apology was an important beginning. But the true test of repentance is not whether we can name the sins of yesterday. It is whether we can recognise the same temptations in ourselves today.
The children were never the bastards.
The real scandal was a culture that taught them they were.