Now, for a very serious post on the latest developments in the Vatican...

Pre-Oscar buz! This just in ... The Catholic League Rant on 'Philomena'.

Debunking 'Philomena'...

Turns out it really is an anti-Catholic film after all...  Really?

Bigoted hi-lights from The Catholic League:

[A] film crafted by the English - The film smears the Irish Catholic Church

Coogan, Sixsmith, Dench, and Frears are all English, and Lee long ago adopted England as her home. Some things never change.

The gist of the story:

Philomena Lee got pregnant as a teenager and was sent to a convent...

Philomena, was tight lipped: she swore herself to secrecy, never telling her children what happened when she was a teenager. 

Alcohol changed that. 

(The author of Philomena) Sixsmith does not say whether Philomena was also bombed when they first met, though he says it was at a New Year's Eve party that same year. Lucky for her, she found an atheist willing to buy her tale.

... 

Consider what happened: In 1952, a teenage girl with her illegitimate child gives him up for adoption because she cannot care for him. She does so of her own volition. In fact, the adoption papers clearly state, right below her signature, that she exercised her free will.

 ...

Just remember ...

The nuns were not tending to the cream of the crop.

...

But who cares about the facts when the goal is to smear the Irish Catholic Church? 

 ...

Philomena's son became a lawyer working for the Republican Party. But he lived a life of reckless drinking and sex, and died of AIDS. 

There was no meeting between him and his mother. 

Because he died.

Read the entire review debunking the film here.  Donohue does a good job placing the blame and shame right back where it belongs - on Philomena Lee:  "Those girls have nobody to blame except themselves." (Made up lines at the end of the film - which was not a documentary BTW.)

The real Philomena meeting Pope Francis.

Not that it makes any difference.

UPDATE 3/2/14

Put aside everything you have read about the film Philomena and please read this review on Catholic Commentary: Thoughts On "Philomena".  It is wonderful.  I picked up the following on the blog, a quote from Frank Duff on allowing unwed mothers to keep their babies "Thus began a revolutionary system for assisting lone mothers to keep their children.":

The depth of Frank Duff's feelings in favour of enabling single mothers to successfully keep the care of their children is revealed in a letter written in 1970, forty years after the opening of the hostel, (the Regina Coeli hostel operated in Dublin by the Legion of Mary), a letter which has earlier recognised the opposition to its work.

"I find it a little difficult in my own mind to make a broad differentiation between the determined separating of the unmarried mother from her child and the relieving of the unmarried mother from her unwanted child by way of abortion. Deep down it seems to me that those two processes have an identical root. This root would be the denial of the fact that a spiritual relationship of the supremest order exists between a mother and her child, inclusive of the unborn child." - CC