FLORIDA
Palm Beach Post
By Lona O'Connor
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Fourteen years after his wife Pat's death, Bob Hittel still lives under her spell.
Their home is infused with her presence. There she is in a black and white picture, the pretty teenager he fell in love with in 1942. In a photograph from middle age, with her thick brown wavy hair turned snow white, she was even more luminous.
Days after her death in 1990, Bob Hittel wrote to Pat's mother, calling their marriage "a fairy tale of love enduring all obstacles."
He soon discovered that his fairy tale had a dark underbelly of secrets, loathing and disgust.
Two months after Pat Hittel died, her husband discovered a diary she had secretly kept for years, hundreds of handwritten pages detailing her passionate love for another man. Although she carefully never mentioned his name, Hittel is sure his wife was writing about Frank Flynn, the family priest.
In the diary, she wrote about her husband of 47 years — and the man who displaced him in her heart:
"He loved me in a quiet way, not real exciting, but I knew I would be taken care of. But as I grew older I realized my inner life was not loved and never had been. Then I met him, oh so loving and exciting. I loved him oh so purely at first. I knew he loved me. He saw a piece of my heart and took it as his own. Oh Lord, how we loved in those first years. My love, my priest. I treasured our intimate talks, our love words to each other."
Pat Hittel was in remission from lymphoma when she met Flynn, a charming, warm-hearted priest, at St. John the Baptist parish in Fort Lauderdale.
Two years later, Flynn was transferred to St. Ignatius Loyola Cathedral in Palm Beach Gardens. Pat Hittel followed Flynn, regularly traveling more than 50 miles north to attend Mass and to study with Flynn for her college courses in religion.
Frank Flynn's name hit the headlines in 2002, after Palm Beach Diocese officials revealed they settled two sexual abuse lawsuits involving him.
Posted by kshaw at December 12, 2004 08:19 AM