Our Father, Frank: A Priest, the Woman He Loved and the Sons They Left Behind

Friday, June 29, 1979 I entered Catholic Charities in Pittsburgh. There waiting for me was the woman who had given birth to me 33 years ago. This was our first meeting since she had put my brother and me up for adoption in 1948. I listened as she answered a question about my birth father. "He was a priest."

As I drove back to Baltimore the following Sunday a heavy and dark pall came over me. I had to remove it.

The pall was the secret of three decades, the story. I had to tell it. So I foraged through the pieces she and her daughter had given me to fashion it.

It is the story of the relationship between my birth mother and the man she loved--the priest she loved so much she could not take him from his first love, the priesthood.