The woman who lost her son to the church

last updated 8 January 2015

Philomena Lee spent more than 50 years searching for her son, said John Hiscock in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). In 1951, the Irish teenager was disowned by her family and banished to a convent after she became pregnant out of wedlock—a fate suffered by thousands of women in Catholic Ireland in the 1950s and ’60s. When her son Anthony was born, the nuns made Lee sign away her parental rights, and in 1955, he was sold to an American couple. “I begged [the nuns] to let me keep him,” says Lee, 78. “I was heartbroken.” Ashamed, she stayed silent about Anthony until 2002, when she confessed her secret to her other two children. The family began searching for Anthony, and discovered he’d been raised in Missouri and renamed Michael. It was too late for a reunion: Michael, a successful lawyer and aide to President George H.W. Bush, had died of AIDS in 1995. He too had searched for his birth mother, but the convent stonewalled his requests for information. Knowing that he was dying, he persuaded the nuns to let his ashes be buried on the convent grounds, together with a headstone engraved with details that would eventually help his blood relations identify him. “I prayed that one day I would find him,” says Lee, “and I know that somewhere up there he has found me.”