The Vatican's Problem with Fathers Who Are Fathers

By Sophia Deboick
The Guardian
January 6, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jan/06/vatican-gabino-zavala-fathers?newsfeed=true

A portrait of Pope Alexander VI, who fathered 10 children. Photograph: Corbis

Last week it emerged that Gabino Zavala, the auxiliary bishop of the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles for nearly 18 years, has a secret family. The existence of his two teenage children has been deemed a sufficiently "grave cause", as defined by
P1E.HTM">Canon 401 of the code of canon law, that he has been obliged to resign. Memories of other notable cases resurface: the Eamon Casey scandal of the early 90s, when revelations that he fathered a child two years before his episcopal appointment led to his resignation as Bishop of Galway; the more recent case of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel, who had as many as six children (although accusations of paedophilia and incest make this alleged offence pale into insignificance). Zavala is hardly the first priest to break his vow of celibacy in such spectacular fashion, and in fact the church has struggled with the problem of "Fathers who are fathers" for centuries.

The children of Catholic priests have historically presented a double problem to the Latin Rite church: clearly they give the game away about dad's lack of conformity to the
PY.HTM">requirement for celibacy, but they also put a financial burden on his employer. Indeed, in Wednesday's statement on the Zavala case, his superior Archbishop José Gomez seemed to privilege the "spiritual care" that the archdiocese has extended to the bishop's secret family above the offered "funding to assist the children with college costs", while the archdiocesan spokesman has been at pains to emphasise that Zavala was not siphoning off church funds to his illegitimate children.

This concern with property has characterised the church's approach down the centuries. From the 11th century the children of priests were to bear the sin of their fathers, as the synod of Pavia and successive church councils sought to enforce clerical celibacy by declaring that the children of priests would have the status of serfs. Despite these efforts, two centuries later the papal legate to England, Otho, found clerical "incontinence" to be endemic and was anguished by the growing problem of the sons of priests making claims on their fathers' property. He said that many clerics were marrying clandestinely, before setting out "to acquire fresh ecclesiastical benefices", then moving to prove the validity of the marriage "after children have been reared from this union" in order to pass on church property. He proposed that marriage should automatically deprive a priest of his benefice and that all remaining property go to the church, not the children, after his death.

With their dynastic ambition, the popes hardly set an example for the ordinary clergy in being more like Christ than Joseph, and the 16th century saw a rash of popes with children. The warlike Julius II, Michelangelo's famous patron, fathered three daughters while he was a cardinal, while Paul III and Pius IV had four and three children respectively before their elections as pontiff. Earlier, the 10th century Lombard historian and Bishop of Cremona, Liutprand, told salacious tales of the fathering of Pope John XI by Sergius III with a 15-year-old girl. But the record for papal fatherhood seems to have been set, unsurprisingly, by Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, who had four children (including Cesare and Lucrezia) with his aristocratic mistress Vannozza Catanei when a cardinal, and a further six others, some allegedly born during his pontificate. Priestly childlessness was purely an ideal, not a way of life, in the Vatican for decades.

Although preservation of celibacy and church finances have informed the church prohibition of parent priests, the more philosophical issue of divided loyalties has also been important.
PY.HTM">Canon 277 says that in celibacy and childlessness "sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity", an ideal that informed the push to celibacy long before its formalisation in church law. As 19th-century theologian Ignaz von Döllinger put it, the priest "has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children". But when biological children do appear, as they inevitably do, the church has not yet found a way to reach a happy accommodation with their father's calling. Perhaps the creation of the Ordinariate, and the entry of Anglican priests with children into the Catholic priesthood (including the remarkable case of Father Ian Hellyer – father of nine), will make the first steps to readdressing this issue.

Meanwhile, it is estimated that some 1000 people in Britain and Ireland are the children of Catholic priests and, as painful stories of rejection, abandonment and financial and emotional neglect still abound, the question is raised of just how many other children throughout the history of the church have suffered similarly.