IRELAND
Irish Examiner
January 18, 2021
Vincent Doyle tells Noel Baker how the discovery that he was the son of a priest opened the way to help others often left thinking “I’m the only one”
In the words and world of Vincent Doyle, everything turns on one sentence, posited early in his new book. “When I found out who I was,” he writes, “like Truman, I wanted out.”
Yet while Truman Burbank, “star” of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, lived in an entirely fake world, Vincent’s was hyper-real, maybe a little surreal.
He had discovered, as an adult, that his father was the man he had known to be his godfather, and a different type of father at that: the Rev. John J Doyle, a Catholic priest.
As he writes in his book, entitled Our Fathers – A Phenomenon of Children of Catholic Priests and Religious and the first of its kind, the penny dropping made perfect sense once he considered the depth of the bond they had shared.
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