Should we be sorry?

Apologies are in the news again.  We've spoken before about whether people should apologise - or be asked to apologise - for things in the past which were nothing to do with them directly.  Well, here we have the head of the Catholic church in England apologising for the way unmarried mothers back in the post-war years were pressured by the church into putting their children up for adoption.  But as I see it, it wasn't the church who were applying the pressure so much as society at large. Pregnancy outside marriage was seen back then as shameful by most people - not just churchgoers - and the pressure to put the child up for adoption usually came most strongly from the mother's own family. Adoption societies - whether church run or not - were merely providing the means - and a very important service it was as well. Consider what the situation would have been otherwise.  The Cardinal might well express disquiet at the way unmarried mothers were demonised at the time, and perhaps for the part the church's moral teachings contributed to that, but I think the church's provision of  adoption services was more a necessary concomitant of the time, and things would have been much worse without them.