My Father, the Father: a memoir of love and double lives

When Mary discovered she was pregnant, she and her lover, Father Ralph, chose to give birth and raise their baby instead of opting for abortion or adoption. Secretly, they acted as full-time parents without disclosing that the father was a Catholic priest. Their lives became a tangled and precarious web of lies to their own families, friends, and their son. In My Father, the Father, author Tony Beadle, that baby born in 1952, shares the story of his high-profile Catholic priest father and his mother, Mary, and how they raised him in an environment of love, lies, and secrets. The intent was twofold: to avoid disgracing an unwed pregnant mother and to prevent damaging the father’s career as a well-known parish priest and fundraiser for the cardinal in Boston, and thus the image of the Catholic Church. This memoir tells how the priest/father led a dual life, spending half of every week with the mother and their son in a home they purchased in a small rural town south of Boston, and the rest as pastor of an affluent church nearby. Mary, who had lived near family members and many relatives, maintained a complex repertoire of lies and actions that kept the boy’s and his father’s existence a secret from them. Twenty-five years after his birth, Beadle met his relatives, garnering decidedly different reactions from both sides.