LONDON (ENGLAND)
Telegraph
November 3, 2017
By Hugh Costello
At the age of 12, Sarah Thomas found out that the father she had never known was a Roman Catholic priest.
“I’d been told he was a lecturer, but being quite inquisitive I’d always suspected there was information I hadn’t been given,” she says. “My mother had been too fearful to tell me the truth.”
Her situation may sound unusual, but there is a global community of people who have been confronted with the fact that their ‘missing’ fathers were in fact priests who had taken a vow to remain celibate, while secretly fathering children they would never acknowledge. I travelled from Buckingham, where 39-year-old Sarah lives, to Uganda while making my BBC World Service documentary My Father the Priest, trying to understand why these men would break the vows they took – and the devastation their behaviour wrought.
When Sarah’s mother found out she was pregnant two years into the relationship, her then-boyfriend “was very upset and broke it off that day. He never spoke to her again on his own. There was always a senior priest who acted as his adviser.”
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