Michael hess biography philomena sister

For decades, Philomena Lee didn’t think there was anything interesting about her life story.

After becoming pregnant out of wedlock in Ireland in 1951, a teenage Lee was disowned by her father and sent to live and work in a convent alongside other unmarried mothers.

When her son Anthony was three years old, the convent’s nuns, in exchange for a generous donation, gave him up for adoption to Americans, who were told he was an orphan. A distraught Lee watched from an upstairs window as strangers drove off with her child.

For the next 50 years, Lee told nobody about Anthony.

That’s just how life went for sinners in the Catholic Church, she thought.

But one day, she told her secret to her daughter, Jane Libberton, who quickly began the search for Lee’s long-lost child. It wasn't easy: Irish law makes it extremely difficult for adopted children to learn about their parents and birth records, and the nuns at the convent