WHEN FR SEÁN McKenna told his parishioners in Derry this week that he was stepping down to pursue "a loving, beautiful and life-giving relationship" in his private life, his parishioners gave him a standing ovation. He didn't want to live a double life any longer and they understood, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
Later in the week Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said so few young men were joining the priesthood that Dublin’s 199 parishes can no longer be assured of a full-time priest.
Momentum seems to be building for the change that the Catholic church has been putting off for a long-time: married priests with families. Many Catholics now accept the notion, and it would be fascinating to see the priest in the pulpit preaching to a congregation that included his children in the front pew.
In such a scenario, I wouldn’t envy those kids. The children of bus-drivers, teachers and doctors don’t have recovery and support groups, but preachers’ kids do. Preacher’s Kids International states: “The stress and strain of ministry is undoubtedly felt by those closest to the minister – his family.”
HAVING GROWN UPas a preacher's kid (PK) – in my case a Lutheran pastor's kid – I can understand the stresses. Living in a fishbowl and pressured to be perfect, it doesn't take much for us to step out of line and be branded as rebels. The stereotype of PKs is that we're either bratty cloned child preachers or we're very bad boys and girls.
From the toes of my shiny patent leather Mary Janes to the tips of my white-gloved fingers, the pretty bow on my dress and the peak of my Easter bonnet, I was a PK through and through. Then adolescence happened and I flipped to the dark side – as PKs tend to do, for the simple reason that they live their lives under scrutiny with the entire parish watching, judging and spreading rumours. It’s like being a celebrity without the material rewards, unless your parent is a TV “megapreacher” with charitable status.
Anti-gay prosperity preacher TD Jakes, who preaches that God wants you to be financially successful, got his ultimate wake-up call not when he spouted his views at a Obama benefit concert, but when his son was arrested for masturbating in front of an undercover male cop in a local park.
The extremes of holier-than-thouness can become so difficult to live with that children crack under the pressure and end up doing the very thing that will get their preacher fathers the worst publicity imaginable. While all kids need to rebel to an extent, the difference for PKs is that rebelling is seen as Satan’s attempt to undermine your preacher father through you. When priests openly bring their babies to Mass, it will be a charming novelty until the more bitter parishioners start writing to the Pope about what a bad father Father is. Because, you see, all preachers live double lives, whether they are expected to be celibate or not. Parishioners expect their clergy to be morally superior and wiser. A married priest wouldn’t be allowed to come to work on Sunday complaining of a hangover and a row with his wife.
Experiences that are normal for other kids – attending wild parties where the police are called, for example – are major sins for PKs because they are expected to be paragons setting an example for everyone else, and they should have been home reading the Bible anyway.
Many PKs do conform to these rigid ideals, following their parents into the ministry, and they’re kind of scary. When we’re good, we’re very, very good and when we are bad we are, as my mother used to say, horrid. But we are in good company. Aretha Franklin, Tori Amos, Ingmar Bergman, Nat King Cole, Alice Cooper, Jessica Simpson, Carl Jung, Condoleezza Rice, Vincent Van Gogh, Malcolm X and Gordon Brown are all preachers’ kids.
We tend to be either rebellious artists or idealistic philosophical types intent on spreading our beliefs. A Dutch study of PKs found that we empathise with others and feel responsible for everything and everyone, while not feeling that we are part of any particular group. Our social conscience pushes us towards helping professions and other social roles. We’re more likely to become doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers – and, indeed, journalists – and we also share an interest in music, literature and the arts in general.
BEING A PK,you're at the epicentre of a community, and yet you're not a part of it. Your parents have taken a vow of poverty and probably don't own their own home. You have to move a lot from place to place and when you meet new people, you're seen as an ambassador for the church rather than for yourself. Psychological studies show that many PKs feel lonely and isolated and fear being themselves because if they are honest with other people, they may be judged and rejected. Nobody's perfect, after all.
And while you fear anyone really getting to know you, the double-edged sword is that as a child you also know a lot more about other people than you are ready for. Growing up in a parsonage, I was a child sharing the family dinner table with disturbed and homeless people. As much as my parents tried to protect me, it was impossible not to see that the church had its share of troubled people and judgmental hypocrites who would take things out on my father, who we rarely saw because he was on call 24 hours a day for his parishioners.
In Catholic Ireland, where the church is reeling from revelations of hypocrisy and child sexual abuse, you can only imagine what it would be like for a child to live with this legacy. Imagine that your father is the local priest and your mother is a teacher in your school. In a small town, it could easily happen, and you wouldn’t be able to cross the street without word getting back to your parents.
When you’re a PK you want to be like other kids, but the expectations of parishioners mean you can’t be. They want you to be better than everyone else, but they resent you for it. Bottling up your identity throughout childhood and adolescence is bound to result in an explosion at some point. As one PK I met asked me: “So did you go wild before you left home or after?”
“The only boy who could ever reach me/ was the son of a preacher man . . .” Sing it, Aretha.
