THE SECRET CHILDREN OF PRIESTS
Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy, but when some break that vow, their children are left to live a lie. Pressure is mounting for the church to hold priests accountable as parents
The children of Roman Catholic priests are emerging from the shadows.
After years of being forced to live with a suffocating secret, they’re demanding that the Vatican — and local dioceses — recognize they exist.
In Canada alone, about 20 sons and daughters of priests have contacted Coping International, a recently formed online support group based in Ireland that is pushing the church and its priests to acknowledge parental responsibilities.
Those interviewed by the Star range from a Vancouver man who felt the daily accusatory glares of villagers in his native Poland to a woman who managed a loving relationship with her father, a Niagara Falls priest, despite an emotionally destabilizing secrecy.
In most cases, the priests who broke their vow of celibacy turned their backs on the children they fathered.
“As a human being, he should have stepped up,” says Susan Zopf, an Alberta woman whose father abandoned her and her mother. “As a man of God, he should have stepped up. Shame on him. Shame on the church.”
The Vatican doesn’t keep track of the number of priests who break their celibacy vows. But with more than 400,000 Roman Catholic priests ministering to 1.1 billion Catholics, informed observers say offspring are probably found across the globe.
“Children of priests are everywhere on Earth and there’s not one word for them from the Vatican,” says Anne-Marie Mariani, 67, a priest’s daughter who runs a support group for others like her in France. “We’re a reality that isn’t talked about. What are they afraid of?”
The pressure being applied by these children is bearing fruit. The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, established by Pope Francis, recently began work on guidelines for how the church should deal with the priests and the children they father.
On a winter afternoon in 2016, Michelle Raftis’s long search brought her to the steps of St. Michael’s Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. She was nervous, and had carefully prepared what she would say to Cardinal Tom Collins. She was done with secrets and lies. Raftis is the daughter of a Catholic priest, a truth the 55-year-old had to hide most of her life. She wanted to know why the church she was raised in allowed a priest to abandon his child.
“I wanted a written apology from the church,” Raftis says.
In Canada and around the world, children of priests have emerged from the shadows to press the Vatican — and their local dioceses — to recognize they exist.
The Vatican appears to have no data on the number of clergy who break their vows of celibacy and father children. But with more than 400,000 Roman Catholic priests ministering to 1.1 billion Catholics, offspring are likely to be found across the globe, says Bill Kilgallon, who recently finished a three-year term as a leading member of Pope Francis’s Commission for the Protection of Minors.
In Canada alone, about 20 sons and daughters of priests have personally contacted Coping International, a recently formed online support group out of Ireland that is pushing the Roman Catholic Church and its priests to acknowledge parental responsibilities.
The Star spoke to four of these now adult children, and to a Quebec woman who sued a diocese over the priest who fathered her son.
The children all struggled with the guilt of a suffocating secret, the financial and emotional strains of being forsaken by their biological father, and the silence of priests focused on avoiding scandal.
The truth was further buried by mothers who didn’t tell their dioceses that a priest had fathered their child. During the 1960s and ’70s when these children were born, such an admission would have deeply shamed the women.
Raftis learned at 13 that her biological father was Rev. Charles Van Item, a family friend who died in 2015. Her mother warned her to never tell anyone.
“When he was alive, I didn’t want to embarrass him, which is funny to say because he walked away from his (parental) duties,” says Raftis, a Catholic grade school teacher who lives in Barrie, north of Toronto. “I didn’t want to em- barrass my mother, either.”
Raftis bottled it up, and while still in her teens developed “a major ulcer.” Later, she would struggle with her mental health.
She confided in her future husband when they were dating, and he was supportive. But her attempt to tell her father-in-law reinforced the indictment she long expected from God-fearing society.
“What would you call the child of a priest?” she tentatively asked him. “The devil’s child,” he replied.
“That clamped me up, big time,” Raftis says.
On that day in March when Raftis walked into Collins’s basilica office for that scheduled meeting in 2016, the cardinal greeted her and her husband Ed warmly. They sat in high-backed chairs, a round coffee table separating Raftis and her husband from the cardinal and another priest.
She asked for written acknowledgement that Van Item was her father and an apology from the church for what she considers a breach of trust. Collins didn’t dispute Van Item’s paternity but declined her requests. He offered instead to pay for counselling.
In an interview, Collins said he first became aware of Raftis’s case when Coping International contacted him in August 2015, almost four months after Van Item died.
“As a human being, he should have stepped up. As a man of God, he should have stepped up. Shame on him. Shame on the church.” SUSAN ZOPF ON HER FATHER, REV. ALBERT ANDREATTA
Collins adds it’s the only case of a priest fathering a child he’s come across during 21 years as a bishop.
If a similar case comes up on his watch, Collins says his message to the priest would be unequivocal: “I would tell him: ‘leave the priesthood and become responsible for your child.’
“When you are the co-creator of another human person, who is a child of God, you have very strong and weighty responsibilities,” he adds.
Collins insists that the actions of priests such as Van Item shouldn’t raise doubts about the vow of celibacy. “It says nothing about celibacy, any more than adultery says anything about marriage. What it says in both cases is about the frailty of the human person, and their need to repent and do what is right.”
He sees celibacy as a tradition that dates back to Jesus and St. Paul, one that “ennobles” those who commit to it. “Our sacred commitments, whatever they may be, make us more profoundly what God wants us to be, and they focus life in a glorious way,” he adds.
Catholic priests could happily marry until the 12th century, when ecumenical meetings known as the Lateran councils banned them from doing so. According to the Vatican’s secretary of state, Archbishop Pietro Parolin, the ban wasn’t strictly enforced until the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
Eastern rites within the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, allow married men to become priests. And married Anglican priests who convert and become Roman Catholic priests can remain married. But celibacy remains a mandatory vow for seminarians entering the Roman Catholic priesthood, a topic of heated debate as the number of priests declines worldwide.
Pope Francis’s predecessor, the now retired Benedict XVI, called celibacy for priests “a sign of full devotion” to the Lord and repeatedly insisted it was here to stay. Francis has been less categorical. He has raised the possibility of ordaining married men as priests. And before becoming pope, he described celibacy as amatter of tradition, rather than dogma. “It can change,” he added.
In the meantime, the Vatican has failed to recognize the children of priests, despite striking modern examples.
In 2012, Los Angeles Bishop Gabino Zavala resigned after acknowledging he was the father of two teenage children. In 2006, a Vatican investigation revealed that Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaires of Christ order, had fathered several children with two women and sexually abused seminarians. In 2001, the National Catholic Reporter published the contents of several reports by women’s religious orders, describing the sexual abuse of nuns by priests in some two dozen countries.
Pressure is mounting for the church to hold such priests accountable as parents.
In France, Anne-Marie Mariani founded in 2012 an organization called the Children of Silence, which supports the sons and daughter of priests. Her parents fell in love in Algeria in the 1950s, when her father was a priest and her mother a nun. She’s written three letters to Pope Francis calling on him to ease the emotional burden of children like her with a gesture of recognition.
“Children of priests are everywhere on Earth and there’s not one word for them from the Vatican,” Mariani, 67, says by phone from Paris. “We’re a reality that isn’t talked about. What are they afraid of?”
The efforts of these children are bearing fruit.
On Aug. 31 last year, the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference blazed a trail by issuing “principles of responsibility regarding priests who father children while in ministry.”
“The wellbeing of his child should be his first consideration,” the bishops state. “At a minimum, no priest should walk away from his responsibilities.”
The statement was a direct response to the efforts of Coping International, a self-help mental-health resource founded by Irish psychotherapist Vincent Doyle, himself the child of an Irish priest. “If a priest can take care of his flock, he can take care of his child,” Doyle says. He adds that dioceses shouldn’t make that more difficult by forcing these fathers to quit the priesthood, thereby leaving them unemployed.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops seems unwilling to follow Ireland’s lead. It told the Star it is “very concerned” about priests who break their vow of celibacy. But the conse- quences of sexually active priests are strictly matters for local diocese and religious orders, according to the conference’s media relations official, Deacon René Laprise. The Vatican may decide for them. Last September, after lobbying by Doyle and an article on the issue in the Boston Globe, Vatican officials asked the Commission for the Protection of Minors to expand its mandate and develop church guidelines for the children of priests. Kilgallon personally informed Pope Francis in a subsequent meeting that the task had been given to a commission working group.
Kilgallon hopes the Vatican guidelines force a sharp change in the approach of local churches, which he describes as mirroring the way they historically dealt with priests who sexually abused children.
“The reluctance has been the feeling that if you admit things openly it can damage the reputation of the church, it can damage people’s faith in the church,” says Kilgallon, who until February was also director of the National Office for Professional Standards of the Catholic Church of New Zealand.
“What the (sex) abuse issue has shown is that the best way to protect the church is to protect the children, not the other way around,” he adds in a phone interview from his Auckland home.
In 2012, when Pope Francis was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, he was quoted in an interview as saying that a priest who fathers a child “has to leave the ministry and should take care of that child, even if he chooses not to marry that woman. For just as that child has the right to have a mother, he has a right to the face of a father.”
For as long as she can remember, Chiara Villar was told to live a lie.
Her biological father is Rev. Anthony Inneo, a Roman Catholic priest who is now 85. She grew up calling him “Popi”; he lovingly called her “bella.”
He would visit Villar and her mother regularly in their small Niagara Falls apartment. Her earliest memories are of his smell — Brut cologne mixed with cigarette smoke — his shiny black shoes and his white collar, which she would playfully pull out every chance she got.
In private, Inneo was a doting father; in public, a stranger. Villar was repeatedly told to keep his identity secret, but never told why.
“My mother and father never sat down with me and said, ‘This is why we have to lie — priests have to remain celibate. He broke a rule but we love you still,’” says Villar, now a 37-year-old mother of twins living in Burlington.
It made for an emotionally trying childhood. In junior kindergarten she stood frozen with fear in a circle as the teacher asked each child what their parents did for a living. She doesn’t remember her answer, just the pain of lying.
When asked to draw family trees, she’d leave one side blank. On Father’s Day, she’d dutifully make a card in class and give it to Inneo the first chance she got. If he took her to the park, or showed up at her birthday party, Villar was told to say he was her uncle or a family friend. In later years she’d sometimes say she was a love child.
“There was never a consistent story,” she says. “It was so confusing.” The questions raised in a young girl were profound: “Who is this man? Who am I?”
Villar says her mother, Maria Mercedes Douglas, provided few answers. Douglas only recently told her about the night in the early 1970s when she met a handsome Inneo in a Buffalo bar. He wasn’t wearing his collar and introduced himself as a social worker. They kept in touch and eventually became intimately involved.
Learning Inneo was a priest came as a shock to Douglas. But the single mother of a daughter from a previous relationship agreed to move into his Welland rectory. She kept house and played the piano during special church services.
By the late 1970s, Inneo had moved with Douglas and her daughter to a home he built in Acapulco, Mexico. In 1981, the family moved back north — Douglas to Buffalo, where she gave birth to Villar, and Inneo to a parish close by in the Diocese of St. Catharines. He was 47.
He soon set Douglas and her daughters up in the Niagara Falls apartment. Then, when Villar was 9, he moved the family to a large, isolated house he built on a 35-acre property surrounded by farmland. Inneo lived in the rectory of St. Ann’s church in Niagara Falls. Villar and her mother moved out of the house two years later, when Douglas met the man she would marry.
Every Friday until Villar was 16, her mother dropped her off for supper with her dad. Villar would race through the front doors and glimpse her dad at the stove, usually making pasta with a cigarette in his mouth. She’d continue through dark corridors to the empty church, gazing with fascination and some fear at the statue of Jesus Christ on the cross.
“Hanging out at a rectory as a little girl is eerie,” she says.
She’d make her way upstairs to her father’s bedroom and bathroom, looking for clues about her mysterious Popi, whose parents and siblings she never got to meet. In a box in his closet she once found pictures — one of her mother and father in swimsuits, another of her dad with his brother and likely his parents at a 50th wedding anniversary. She took both.
“I was hoarding stuff about him to make sense of our relationship,” Villar says.
She didn’t become fully conscious about her dad being a priest, and his role in the church, until she was about 12, when priests began teaching religion classes at her Catholic school. She learned about the vow of celibacy from boys laughing at how priests aren’t supposed to have sex.
She began to wonder if people knew her secret, if they whispered it behind her back. If she didn’t get a part in a school play, was it because the drama teacher knew? “It destroyed my confidence,” she says. Questions to her father became more pointed and visits to the rectory more tense. After one bad visit, she went home, smashed a glass on the floor and used the pieces to cut herself. She was13.
She did well in school and even became prom queen. But emotional blows came frequently. In Grade 9, as hundreds of high school students gathered in the gym for mass, Villar looked up to the altar and realized, “Oh my God, my dad’s giving mass.”
She sat mortified as boys made fun of her father’s Italian accent.
She rebelled. During visits, she called her father a hypocrite, lied about being pregnant and planning an abortion, or blurted the most blasphemous thought that came to mind.