Celibacy, A Love Story

Mimi Bull grew up secure and happy in the love of family, friends, and neighbors, never questioning the unusual circumstances that caused her to be adopted in the late 1930s by an older woman with an adult daughter. It was years before she learned the secret truth: the women were her grandmother and her biological mother, and the story of her adoption had been concocted not only to shield her mother’s reputation, but to hide the fact that her father was the gregarious young parish priest everyone adored. Only very recently has the Catholic Church begun to acknowledge the existence of children of priests, and Bull writes candidly of the emotional toll that this policy of secrecy and denial took on her—“I should like to have lived a life with my loving parents, knowing who we all were, knowing my father’s family from the beginning, and without the forty years of depression that compromised me and those I loved.