A Mother, a Sick Son and His Father, the Priest

[Christa]

O’FALLON, Mo. — With three small children and her marriage in trouble, Pat Bond attended a spirituality retreat for Roman Catholic women in Illinois 26 years ago in hopes of finding support and comfort.

What Ms. Bond found was a priest — a dynamic, handsome Franciscan friar in a brown robe — who was serving as the spiritual director for the retreat and agreed to begin counseling her on her marriage. One day, she said, as she was leaving the priest’s parlor, he pulled her aside for a passionate kiss.

Ms. Bond separated from her husband, and for the next five years she and the priest, the Rev. Henry Willenborg, carried on an intimate relationship, according to interviews and court documents. In public, they were both leaders in their Catholic community in Quincy, Ill. In private they functioned like a married couple, sharing a bed, meals, movie nights and vacations with the children.

Eventually they had a son, setting off a series of legal battles as Ms. Bond repeatedly petitioned the church for child support. The Franciscans acquiesced, with the stipulation that she sign a confidentiality agreement. It is now an agreement she is willing to break as both she and her child, Nathan Halbach, 22, are battling cancer.

With little to lose, they are eager to tell their stories: the mother, a once-faithful Catholic who says the church protected a philandering priest and treated her as a legal adversary, and the son, about what it was like to grow up knowing his absentee father was a priest.

“I’ve always called him Father Henry — never Father, never Dad,” said Nathan, at home between hospital visits. “I always felt he picked religion over me.”

The relationship between Ms. Bond and the priest is hardly unique. While the recent scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have focused on the sexual abuse of children, experts say that incidences of priests who have violated sexual and emotional boundaries with adult women are far more common.

Read the rest here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/us/16priest.html?em

[Buzz Clik]

1. Those crazy kids.

[DeSwiss]

2. So the Franciscans break all the Vatican's rules....

...requiring strict celibacy for their preachers, but it's the nuns cloisters and convents that they're closing down and selling so they can use it for hush money (as in this case here), or to pay for their "other moral transgressions and slippage" (pedophilia cases and their lawyers).

Absolutely outstanding.

I don't know what people are talking about -- of course we should continue to listen to The Church's pontifications and instructions to us on how to live our lives in a good and moral way.

All you have to do is to live your life the exact opposite way that they do.

- Like Carrie Prejean's opposite marriage, these guys practice opposite morality.....


K&R

[hedgehog]

3. Priests who have affairs and dump the women they're involved with

are kept in good standing and sometimes even promoted. Priests that fall in love and wish to marry are punished and expelled. What's wrong with this picture?

[rd_kent]

4. I am not surprised. The hypocrisy is expected.....