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Compass: Aug 13

Brendan Watkins is the son of a priest and nun. It took him 30 years to find out, but he’s not the only one.

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This week Compass hears from the children of priests, and their struggle for truth.

When Brendan Watkins was a teenager he kept his adoption secret because he didn’t want to be targeted by bullies. Later, when he was about to start his own family he was blocked from finding out about his own genetic heritage by an almost impenetrable wall of secrecy from the Catholic Church and the State, before discovering the identities of his own biological parents, a priest and a former nun.

He also discovered that globally there are thousands of children of priests, just like him, who as adults found their biological parents through DNA testing and social media groups. And that while there are often no consequences for the priests, the church often treated these children and their mothers with cruelty and a lack of compassion.

In Australia one such mother tells of being pressured to have an abortion by three priests, and then pushed to have the child adopted after its birth. In Germany, a senior academic from the University of Frankfurt, and former nun Dr. Doris Reisinger, reveals her latest research which reveals hundreds of priests have been involved in forced adoptions or procuring abortions in the last 20 years.

Australia’s peak adoption body calls for a public and independent inquiry, and Brendan and another child of a priest, Linda Kelly Lawless, pursue fresh evidence of the scandal that church and state are trying to keep hidden.

Production Credit: Compass ABC TV

6:30pm Sunday on ABC.

2 Responses

  1. Unfortunately he is not the only one…we had a nunnery/orphanage and a monastery almost opposite each other in our local area (on prime land on a hill overlooking our local bay owned by the richest diocese …eventually the nunnery was converted to an aged care facility)…when one of those children in the orphanage became of age and left they decided to trace their heritage and discovered their parents were from that nunnery and monastery…this made headline news in our city when they decided to speak out but soon after died down quickly… my heart goes out to those who were mistreated by the “people of god” …I visited an elderly neighbour who moved to the facility for aged care and it gave me the creeps to be honest.

  2. This sounds like the guy who was on Noni Hazelhutst’s show. People were very secretive about his parents & he found out they were a priest & a nun. I wonder if this is the same guy.

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