Pope Leo XIV and the children conditioned by silence
“What stops one’s identity from being fully realised? The answer is coercive control, a crime in most developed states.”
János Csongor Kerekes / flickr | Creative Commons
The knee jerk preference for secrecy fosters prolonged silence – free will is removed and psychological harm germinates, resulting in an agoraphobic psyche for the child of the ordained.
Last night, I spoke with a child of a priest who is a psychologist. An immensely intelligent woman. We spoke at length about the specific trauma that children of priests suffer. This has long been a topic of consideration for me.
In my book Our Fathers published by FeedARead in 2021, I spoke about the phenomenon of Silentium, a term that I coined to help describe a situation. “Silentium, the process of silencing the child of an ordained person or religious, concerning the child’s identity as the child of an ordained person/religious, whilst forsaking the child’s intrinsic right to freedom and choice.” If Silentium is the process, what is the effect of Silentium?
Bishop Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, addressing Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo Catholic University during the opening ceremony of the 2016 academic year, confirmed – when speaking about those “who wish to walk the path proposed by the Church” – that “we do not want to lose our own identity; we want to fully realise it.” He spoke of “a true integral synthesis […] [admonishing] coercion or irrational imposition” to fully realise identity.
Prevost was not talking about children of priests, nor anything close to the topic, directly or indirectly; however, the analogy stands. What stops one’s identity from being fully realised? The answer is coercive control, a crime in most developed states.
The knee jerk preference for secrecy fosters prolonged silence, thus, free will is removed and psychological harm germinates, resulting in an agoraphobic psyche within the mind of the child of the ordained, where the child is afraid to step outside unnatural boundaries imposed, designed to protect adults and institution, for it is all they have ever known. Yet, the instinct, as with all human beings, is that such boundaries are unnatural.
The paranoia and anxiety of stepping “outside” the reinforced boundaries, created for the child of the ordained to observe, promotes fear. Fear of going beyond what is allowed, expected or anticipated of him or her. The notion of never revealing the true identity of their biological parent is so ingrained in their core beliefs that they preserve that core belief before all others. Curiously, that primordial core belief is unnatural as it collides with the psychological compulsion that encourages openness and transparency surrounding identity, which links with the need to belong.
In addition, I have met children of priests/religious who fiercely defend their controlling parents, a position reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome. While these terms are borrowed, they shine a light on the internal workings of the clericalist wheels of injustice, themselves coated with a layer of conceited humility that proudly announces, with hand on heart and eyes downcast, whispering as if to say … “this is what’s right for the child”.
Thus, exculpating parents, the clericalist institution and the domestic and societal environment from the guilt of the foreseeable end of coercive control, itself veiled beneath clever linguistic trickery – “it’s a matter of privacy”. Privacy assumes choice; control does not. A child of a priest does not have free will to choose, because that choice was never offered to us, historically speaking.
“We do not want to lose our own identity; we want to fully realise it.” This desire to “fully realise” our identity is so central to what forms us human beings, belongs to the central tenets, that is, the teachings of the Catholic Church, building up the body of Christ. The notion that a child is sullied or in some way lessened as a consequence of his or her father’s sins (Ezekiel 18:20) is contrary to the Holy Spirit, and no priest worth his salt would ever agree that a person is somehow “less” because of the actions of another.
The Holy Spirit, the breath of the Word of God, visible in Ezekiel 18:20, announces that “the son shall not inherit the guilt of the father…”. Yet this is persistently contradicted every time coercive control takes the place of natural freedoms afforded to children at conception because children of priests are harnessed and limited, and imprisoned so as not to expose the Church with its trousers down. Thus, this ingrained process of assuming silence in place of freedom of choice conjures circumstances where the children of the ordained inevitably bear the yoke of the sin of the father (in every sense of the word), harming them, denaturing them, and impacting them negatively.
The father should bear the yoke of fatherhood, and when he doesn’t, he is protecting the face of the institution of the church and not the beautiful face of his own child, and he does that by utilising the historic and well-oiled machine of maintaining quiet and controlling the child. This process of handing on the fruit of sin to the son or daughter flies in the face of Scripture and is thus mortal sin, as it is a persistent and willful act that goes against the Word of God without the need for exegesis.
Where one or two have done this, it is the fault of one or two, but where an act is done by countless, historically so, the finger of blame equally points toward a silent partner in this sin of harming children (of the ordained), a systematic partner, the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.
The son shall not inherit the guilt of the father. Well, in this case, ya know what … (where a child of a priest exists) we do just that, bearing his yoke via silence, coercive control, secrecy, adverse childhood experiences alongside a horrifying everyday reality that may be best described as an agoraphobic existence.
Bishop Prevost spoke of “a true integral synthesis, […] [admonishing] coercion or irrational imposition”. In the case of the children of the ordained and religious, that would simply be achieved by condemning the systematic, step-by-step, assumed and historic and indeed preferred blind eye approach to the side wound of celibacy and its inevitable fruits, us, the children of the ordained.
In doing so, you say God was right, because God allows free-will and he “has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). Whereas, if you deny the existence of the systematic “shushed” process that coercively corrals children of the ordained beneath a sheet of invisibility, to make man look good, you hand on his yoke of sin to me, and others like me.
The Pontifical Commission for the Safeguarding of Minors met with His Holiness recently, and among other things, discussed the annual report for the commission, which itself speaks about children of priests.
I asked the Vatican “was the topic of children of priests, and\or the working group on vulnerability and their study on children of priests discussed? If it was discussed, what was said and did His Holiness comment?” The brief reply reads: “The hearing to which you refer was a private meeting.”
How appropriate!
Amen
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