ShareThisWhen Henry Willenborg fathered a child out of wedlock with single mother Pat Bond, it never occurred to him to marry her. Henry was (and is) a Catholic priest, and priests don't marry.
Nor did he consider leaving the priesthood to support mother and child. Instead, he informed his Franciscan superiors, who kept him on as rector of their seminary in Quincy, Ill., and offered child support to Bond if she would keep quiet.
Now, 22 years later, Willenborg is the popular pastor of a large historic parish in Ashland, Wis.
Journalist Laurie Goodstein recently updated the tawdry story for The New York Times. At present the son, Nathan, is being treated for brain tumors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, while his mother has developed tumors in her appendix and colon. Willenborg has no contact with either mother or son.
According to Goodstein, Nathan's story is less an account of a deadbeat dad than it is of "how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements, and to keep the priests in active ministry."
Willenborg says of his fellow Franciscans, "We've been very caring, very supportive, very generous over these 20-something years. It's very tragic what's going on with Nathan, but, you know..." leaving the sentence unfinished.
For eight months following Nathan's birth, Willenborg visited Pat and Nathan every night. The visits ended when another woman appeared, claiming she had been in a sexual relationship with the priest ever since she was in high school.
The Franciscans responded by sending Willenborg to a treatment center in New Mexico for priests with sexual disorders and substance addictions. He acknowledged that his order has neither disciplined him nor encouraged him to leave religious life.
Concerning the case, Father Michael Perry, now vicar general of the worldwide Franciscan community, told Goldstein, "Efforts were made not only to respect the law but to take into account the dignity and the rights and the care of the child."
Changing the rules to permit priests to marry is no solution to such tragedies, any more than wedlock is a cure for serial adulterers. A 1990 study by former Benedictine scholar A.W. Richard Sipe revealed that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and upwards of 10 percent more had occasional heterosexual affairs. Typically, these priests expressed no interest in marrying the women with whom they were involved.
In the wake of the pedophile priest scandal, the Catholic church has concentrated on purging its seminaries of candidates for the priesthood who are gay or have homosexual leanings -- this despite the fact that few pedophiles are gay.
Cait Finnegan is the founder of Good Tidings, a support group for women and priests in sexual relationships. She reports that, with the complicity of the church, women are the victims of playboy priests who use their vow of celibacy as an excuse to escape personal responsibility.
(David Yount's 14th book, "Making a Success of Marriage" (Rowman & Littlefield), will appear in November. He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.)
AMAZING GRACE
