One morning last month, if you had been in the village of Sarceaux in northwestern France, you might have seen a man named Olivier, 33 years of age, placing in the mailboxes of townspeople a sheet of paper with a shocking message that he had composed on his computer.

The message angrily told what it was like to grow up the unacknowledged son of a Roman Catholic priest. For his whole life almost up to that point, everyone had considered him fatherless. On his school identification papers he had always written “Father’s name: X,” as was customary for children of  unknown paternity.

In 1989 he had discovered his father’s identity.  However, he did not feel free to discuss the matter until this past January when his mother went on television and talked openly about her 40-year relationship with a priest whose name she did not disclose. Several times previously, she had talked about it on television, but anonymously.

Now, with the backing of his mother Françoise, Olivier had decided to reveal his father’s name to the residents of Sarceaux.

His father, it turns out, is Jean Mabille, now 80 years old and the parish priest of Sarceaux. In addition to his son, he also fathered two other children by Françoise, sisters younger than Olivier. Since the end of last year, the priest has also been a grandfather.

When they first came together, Françoise was only 16 years old and the priest was 25 years her senior. When Olivier was born, he says, he could not have acknowledged his paternity but he promised his bishop not to see Françoise again. He managed to keep this promise for 13 years but the couple ultimately came together again.

After keeping her lover’s identity secret for so many years, Françoise finally decided to expose the father of her children. The Paris newspaper Le Monde, which recently reported the story, quotes her as saying: “I would be remiss to wait till he was dead before witnessing” to what the priest had done.

Now that the news is out, the local church has had to take action. The bishop of Sées, with the backing of his diocesan council, has told Jean Mabille to acknowledge his children. Through the years, the priest has been giving some money to Françoise for the children’s support, but this new requirement goes further in requiring him to go public.

In general, Francoise does not feel bitter against her quasi-husband. However, she has one complaint, namely that “he shares the joys and sorrows of other people but not ours.” She was baptized as a Catholic but now is an agnostic.

People in Sarceaux appreciate their pastor, one recalling how he comforted her when her father died. There also seems to be widespread feeling that priests should be allowed to marry. “A pastor is not a stick of wood,” says one man. Listeners to a call-in radio program said, in essence: “It’s better for a priest to produce children than to be a pedophile.”

His son feels thankful at not having to appear a half-orphan any longer. Were he still a schoolboy, he would not now have to mark his father’s identity with those humiliating X’s. Olivier has been in touch with the bishop by both  telephone and email. The prelate admits that there’s a basic underlying question connected with the story–the celibacy of priests.

How the daughters feel, Le Monde does not tell us. It would not be surprising to find them identifying with their mother and what she has been through in this longtime affair.

The advance of age can bring surprises, some of which can be quite unsettling. The situations of Jean and Françoise, she only 56, he 80, surely differ between them. And having unfolded in such a small community, this crisis has an especially dramatic edge.

I wonder how the pastor feels about having been exposed at his advanced age. Perhaps he has been fearing the revelation just now made by his clandestine sexual partner. Or maybe he had confidence that, after so many years, the secret would never be revealed.

As a psychiatrist friend has suggested to me, this crisis in Jean’s life can be seen as a rich opportunity for a spiritual breakthrough. Confronted with the public knowing about his illicit liaison of years past, he can now accept the consequences of what he did and reach out to his children and their mother with love and sympathy.  Whether he feels in inclined to do so, however, seems doubtful, at least if the newspaper reports are accurate.  

The best index of his current feelings may be his reported failure to telephone Françoise since the time when she went public. The bishop wants him to acknowledge his wife and children, but he apparently shows himself more distant from her than formerly.

Further details about the story are available online in French editions of both Le Monde and Figaro.

Richard Griffin