The story of my family has always been shaped by containment. My mother lived her entire life inside it, first as a newborn hidden in a convent, later as a girl confused by the circumstances of her own birth, and then as a woman expected to absorb the consequences of other people’s decisions without protest. When I began searching for answers about her past, I discovered that the Church operated with the same logic. Their language, their letters, their silences all moved toward a single aim: not clarity, not care; just containment. My grandfather, a Catholic priest, fathered a child with a married woman. Yet the records I uncovered didn’t described this as a violation or even a crisis. Instead, he appeared as “an unsettled lad” who later took “a hiatus to spend some time in a hermitage.” The harm, its depth, its human cost, all but disappeared. My mother became a whispered footnote, an administrative inconvenience rather than a child displaced, hidden, and left to grow up with the consequences. The women involved with my grandpa vanished entirely from the narrative. His eulogy devoted paragraphs to the pedigree of his aristocratic parents but made no mention of his ex wife, daughter or grandchildren - a gesture that made its priorities clear. This silence sits uneasily beside the Vatican’s admission that its internal guidelines for priests who father children are designed to protect the child. I have never seen evidence of that priority in my family. My recently divorced and pregnant grandmother, fresh from the scandal of an affair with a priest, was placed in a convent, her presence never acknowledged in the diocesan files I saw. I’ve come to understand that this was a common arrangement for women carrying the children of priests: they were removed from view, held in silence, and then returned to the world as though nothing had happened. My grandmother never spoke about that period, but I can only imagine its strain. My mother was born in a time before trauma was recognised in the way it is now; little thought was given to how such beginnings shape a life. Even so, the design is unmistakable. My mother’s birth was arranged to shield the priestly body, not the actual bodies left to endure the consequences. The diocesan accounts of my grandfather’s disappearance after my mother’s birth are contradictory. One diocese told me he had “disappeared”; another that he had spent time in a “period of contemplative retreat.” The truth was that he had been living in a hermitage in Europe, a detail that, once uncovered, made the official stories ring thin. I was told a monsignor had “toured Europe” searching for him, which sat oddly alongside the very public knowledge of the hermitage’s location. The searching, it seemed, was less about finding him than about establishing a conscientious-looking paper trail. As I gathered further accounts, the pattern blurred rather than sharpened. One monsignor noted that, before his disappearance, my grandfather had been “repeatedly requesting a move” but received no reply, not even from the Bishop’s secretary. An archbishop wrote that there was “no record” of my grandfather ever entering a laicisation process, even though the monsignor had supposedly ‘scoured Europe trying to deliver the documents’. His eulogy calmly mentioned that he had spent time in a specific location at a specfic hermitage, contradicting the claim that his whereabouts was unknown. Each account was tidy in isolation; together they form a mosaic of polite contradiction. This is not transparency. It is the careful distribution of partial truths so that no one, least of all the present day reader, can hold the whole of it at once. At no point was I asked about my mother’s mental health, whether she struggled with her origins, or how this history reverberated through our family. The questions that mattered were never asked. After my grandmother’s divorce and my mother’s birth, my grandfather did eventually return. He married my grandmother, which I acknowledge as a testament to his conscience and his desire to support his child. But soon after their marriage, my grandmother underwent a hysterectomy, reportedly at his request - there was no medical need for the surgery. This fact, like so many others, was presented to me as though it were inevitable and unremarkable. No acknowledgement of the coercion implicit in such a decision. No recognition of its emotional or physical consequences. Just another unfortunate “detail,” quietly folded away. There are many more. After my grandparent’s divorce, when my mother was a mentally unwell teenager, my grandfather was permitted back into the Church. I have photographs from that time of him in his clerical suit and dog collar. My mother continued visiting him. He lived for years in a poorly furnished caravan, often speaking of penance for his sins, the implication being that we were the product of those sins and privately said Mass for us. Later down the line, a bishop’s report described the “terrible” state of the caravan, praising a monsignor who later found better accommodation for him. The implication - subtle but unmistakable - was that his isolation reflected poorly on the family. There was no space in that narrative for the chaos experienced by his descendants, or for the spiritual confusion that inevitably arises in those born of affairs, divorce, violated vows and priestly chaos. When I met with bishops to understand my history, I was told there was “not much on file,” or that documents had “never reached the diocese,” or that “these matters that happened so many years ago“. This is the language of institutional self-protection, not compassion and certainly not curiosity. The grief and distortion we lived with for decades were swept into abstraction: confusion - as though we had simply misread the script; matters - as though these were clerical mishaps rather than human harm. Containment again. In telling this story, I am refusing containment. I hope that, one day, containment might give way to openness. It would be extraordinary to see an appetite for pathways that are honest, trauma-informed, and survivor-led; pathways that do not rely on euphemism, empty prayers, or dubious safeguarding practices. Children of clergy should not have to live with an erased heritage, reconcile contradictory diocesan accounts, or make personal appeals to the Vatican to learn the simplest truths about their own lives. Prioritising welfare should involve a structured, jargon-free approach. It should not require fluency in canon law or ecclesiastical nomenclature. Yet this remains far removed from the experience of children of priests, and from the dialogue we are expected to navigate. If the Church were even slightly curious about the impact of intergenerational trauma, I would volunteer myself as a case study. But there is no recognition of the corollary between cause and effect, not this kind of cause, not this kind of harm. I am not claiming that everything in my life leads back to the Church; far from it. I am saying that significant trauma casts a long, intricate shadow, and its threads are difficult to unpick. The Church had a hand in its making. Their preferred response is containment. What a shame. If the Church wishes to speak of “natural obligations,” then let this be counted among them: to face the past without minimising it, and to offer a form of care that does not begin and end in the confines of silence.