The Vatican has revealed that it has secret rules for priests who father children despite their celibacy vows, The New York Times said in a report.
The Vatican has confirmed that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and have children, the report said.
“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti told The Times. “It is an internal document.”
The confirmation about the secret rules came after a psychotherapist in Ireland, Vincent Doyle, told The Times that he was 28 when he learned from his mother that the Roman Catholic priest he had always known as his godfather was in truth his biological father.
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The discovery led him to create a global support group, Coping International, to help other children of priests like him.
When he pressed bishops to acknowledge these children, some church leaders told him that he was the product of the rarest of transgressions.
In 2017, Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, the Vatican’s envoy to the UN in Geneva, finally showed him a document of Vatican guidelines for how to deal with priests who father children, proof that he was hardly alone.
According to the Archbishop, these children are termed “children of the ordained”, Doyle told The Times.
Doyle said when he had asked for a copy, the Archbishop refused, saying it was secret.
The development comes as the Vatican prepares for a meeting on Thursday on the ongoing child sexual abuse crisis.
According to The Times, the children are sometimes the result of affairs involving priests and laywomen or nuns and others of abuse or rape.
There are no official estimates of how many such children exist. But Doyle told The Times that his support group website has 50,000 users in 175 countries.
The tradition of celibacy among Roman Catholic clergy was codified in the 12th century, but not necessarily followed, even in the highest positions within the Church.
A priest named Rodrigo Borgia admitted to having four children with his mistress before he became Pope Alexander VI, a scandal that helped spur the Protestant Reformation led by a German priest named Martin Luther.
Officially, Catholic priests are required to maintain a life of celibacy, refraining from any form of sexual activity. A growing tide of sexual abuse scandals involving priests around the world has shown these vows are often broken.
Last August, Pope Francis, facing sexual abuse crises in several countries, wrote a letter to all Catholics, asking each one of them to help root out “this culture of death†and vowing there would be no more cover ups.
I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
