"The scandal that comes": the secret Vatican rules for priests who have children – 19/02/2019

Irish psychotherapist Vincent Doyle was 28 years old when his mother told him that the Catholic priest whom he knew as his godfather was actually his biological father.

After the discovery, he created a worldwide support group to help other children of priests who, like him, were ashamed of being born from an ecclesiastical scandal. When he lobbied the bishops for them to recognize these children, some church leaders told him that he, Vincent, product of the rarest transgression.

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But an archbishop finally showed him what he was looking for: a Vatican document with rules on how to treat priests who had children. Proof that he was not at all alone.

"My God, here's the answer," he recalls as he reads the document. He asked if he could take a copy and the archbishop said no: it was secret.

This week, the Vatican confirmed, apparently for the first time, that the department that oversees priests around the world has general rules for knowing how to proceed when a cleric breaks the celibacy and has a son.

"I can confirm that these rules exist", wrote the Holy See's spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, in response to a consultation The New York Times. "It's an internal document."

The question becomes hard to ignore.

─This is the scandal that is coming Said the Irishman Doyle. There are children of priests everywhere.

As the Vatican prepares for an unprecedented summit between the pope and the bishops around the world to deal with the devastating crisis of child badual abuse, many people feel aggrieved by the culture of secrecy and the scandal aversion that the church has They think to go to Rome to put pressure.

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They will be the victims of abusive priests. They will be nuns abused by priests. And there will be the children of the priests, including Doyle, who plans to meet several important prelates.

For the church, stories like Doyle's are uncomfortably drawing attention to how priests violate celibacy. And for the old ecclesiastics and liberals within the church, it comes down to wondering if this is not the time to make vow of chastity an option, as in other Christian institutions .

Boys are sometimes the result of adventures between priests and lay or religious women. But other times they are the result of abuse or violations.

There are extremely rare and high profile cases, although the vast majority are far from the public eye.

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The long tradition of celibacy among Catholic monks was codified in general terms in the twelfth century. But it has not necessarily been obeyed, even in the highest spheres. Before becoming Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo de Borja being a priest, he had 4 children with his lover: an excess that collaborated with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther. Luther wrote sarcastically that the Pope had as much control over celibacy as over his intestines to be able to become one.

There is no estimate of the number of children of cures. But Doyle said the official website of his group, called Coping International, has 50,000 users from 175 countries.

Vatican spokesman Gisotti said the 2017 internal document summed up a decade of work on the procedures and his "fundamental principle" was "the protection of boys". The "request" to the priest to abandon the priesthood and to badume "his responsibilities of father by devoting himself exclusively to the child" is among the rules.

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However, another official of the Holy See said that the "request" was just a formality. Mgr Andrea Ripa, 2nd archbishop of the Congregation for the Clergy who oversees more than 400,000 priests, said in a brief interview that "it is impossible to impose" the dismissal of a priest and "can only ask for it" to the priest himself.

He added that the Church acted precisely because priests did not usually present this request: "If you do not ask, they will throw you out."

The Irish bishops have their own guidelines and made them public in 2017. Doyle (who at the time was studying to become a priest and was seeking to cooperate with church leaders) had played a role in this evolution, according to the President of the Irish Bishops' Conference, Irish Long.

These principles of the Irish Church do not include the explicit request of priests to leave the priesthood, but they emphasize: "A priest must badume his responsibilities, just like any new father: in a personal, legal, moral and economic way ".

Pope Francis did not talk much about this issue. In his book On the sky and the earth (written in collaboration with Rabbi Abraham Skorka in 2010, while he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires), he says that a priest who violates celibacy during a moment of pbadion could continue in the priesthood, but not sure he had a child.

The text says that the natural law is prior to its right to heal. And he adds that the first responsibility of a priest is with his son and "he must leave the ministry" to take care of him.

The specialists in canon law emphasize that there is no law in the Church that requires a priest to leave the priesthood to have a child.

"There is nothing about anything," said Laura Sgro, a specialist in Rome. "As this is not a canonical crime, there is no reason for expulsion."

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Doyle and other children of priests and even former priests do not believe that the dismissal of the priesthood is always suitable for boys. Sometimes this can mean depriving them of family support.

"I do not think unemployment is a response to fatherhood," said Doyle.

In any case, some children of priests want their parents to take them out of the Church.

At the age of 54, Reverend Pietro Tosi raped the mother of Erik Zattoni, when she was 14 years old. His family, said Zattoni, tried to force the priest to recognize the son, but he refused. The family was expelled from the house belonging to the parish, in a small town outside Ferrara (Italy), in the streets of which they often crossed paths.

"And he never said anything," says Zattoni, who is now 37 years old.

The children of priests are increasingly using DNA tests to prove that their parents and / or mothers are priests and / or nuns.

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"This is a breakthrough," says Linda Lawless, 56, Australian amateur genealogist, daughter of a priest and NGO collaborator at Coping International. And no matter who can do it.

By Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo. Translation: Abel Escudero Zadrayec.