Senior Catholic cleric resigns after secret family revealed
The former rector of a prominent Legion of Christ seminary in Rome is leaving the priesthood after admitting to having a secret family, including two children of his own, which he concealed for years from Roman Catholic authorities.
The conservative Catholic order announced this weekend that Father Oscar Turrion, a popular 49-year-old Spanish priest who was made rector of the Pontifical Maria Matter Ecclesiae International College in Rome in 2014, will leave the priestly ministry in order to dedicate more time to a family he has raised clandestinely until now.
Back in March, Father Turrion first told his superiors at the Pontifical Maria Matter Ecclesiae International College, which houses approximately 100 male diocesan seminarians from around the globe, that he had recently fathered a daughter.
As Roman Catholic priests are bound to a vow of celibacy, the order offered him a “period of reflection,” and then in August appointed a substitute rector.
The Legion revealed this week that Father Turrion told authorities in a letter he had decided to leave the ministry after admitting that his infant daughter is in fact the second child he fathered with a woman he fell in love with several years ago when the order was going through a period of turmoil.
He kept the first-born child, a son reportedly born eight years ago, and the ongoing relationship with the child’s mother, a closely guarded secret for years, including during the period he was being considered for rector. In a letter released by the Legion, Turrion asked for prayers and "foregiveness for the scandal . . for my bad example."
Popular and passionate about football, Father Turrion was one of the few ordained priests invited each year to join the seminarians on the field in the Clericus Cup, an annual football tournament between teams from the Rome seminary colleges.
The shock revelation has rattled the institution, which said in a statement it was saddened and "conscious of the impact that the negative example" had set to seminarians and the Christian faithful.
The order faced a similar scandal in 2013, when American priest Thomas Williams, a professor of moral theology at the Legion’s university in Rome and a prominent TV commentator, also announced he would leave the priesthood after admitting he had fathered a child. And in 2006 the Vatican sentenced its founder, Mexican Father Marcial Maciel Delgollado to a life of “prayer and penance” after discovering he had sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children out of wedlock.
Today, the subject of how to manage priests secretly fathering children is gradually becoming less taboo inside the Vatican, thanks in part to the persistent efforts of Vincent Doyle, an Irish Catholic psychotherapist who discovered that his father had been a priest and went on to found the Coping International support group for children of priests, who he said often face emotional, psychological and financial difficulties after years of living with “guilty secrets."
Earlier this year Irish Catholic bishops passed new guidelines for “the principles of responsibility regarding priests who father children while in the ministry,” urging the wellbeing of the child to be put first, personally, legally and financially.
