Dear Wives Of Priests

I have been writing a blog for wives of priests, The Apostles Wives Club, http://theapostleswivesclub.com/, for a little over a year. The purpose of my blog is to connect with other women married to priest and to share our stories, but all I receive is silence from you. I assumed there might be many wives like me wishing to hear from each other and ready to claim their identity. When nothing happened, I understood that other wives weren’t interested or they didn’t want to talk. Instead of hearing from wives, I started hearing from women who were involved with priest in secret forbidden relationships, and I began answering their questions and addressing their issues. This lead to the idea of writing a book; so I started a book project, http://theapostleswivesclub.com/book-project/.

The editor of CORPUS Reports, David Gawlick, agreed to print an article where I could appeal to priests’ wives and their husbands for ways they could contribute. Then a funny thing happened. I started to realize that most of what I was writing about for these women were issues that most all priests’ wives have had to deal with to some degree and there wasn’t so much difference between the wives and the women not married. Instead of an article, I wrote a letter and I am including it here for you too because maybe you don’t read CORPUS Reports and you might want to contribute to my book in some way by sharing a story or a piece of advice.

Dear Wives Of Priests,

I have been intending to write an article for CORPUS Reports to ask readers, you, wives of priest, and your husbands to share with me some of your story and offer one piece of advice for women involved with priests for the book I have wanted to write. However, I couldn’t write the article because I am filled with conflict about it. I am not conflicted about wanting to write something more in book form, but I feel more conflict about how to present this subject to those of you who don’t seem to talk. I don’t know if you have ever explored the issues that we deal with on my blog, The Apostles Wives’ Club.

My blog wasn’t intended for women involved in secret forbidden relationships, but for women married to priests. However, the more I write, the more I realize that most of us women married to priests , with the exception of those who started relationships with their husbands after he left the priesthood, were once involved in secret forbidden relationships of some duration and intensity. I don’t quite know how to address this and or how to come to terms with this in an article since I believe that secret relationships are basically unhealthy and destructive.
There are so many issues involved with secrets. I believe that even if a couple eventually marries there will be issues stemming from that to deal with later. There are also the relationships that might have begun when a priest was a pastor, counselor, spiritual advisor, or confessor to a woman. Those are so unhealthy period. Maybe this is why I don’t hear from you. Maybe you just don’t want to deal with the subject.

There is just so much that really has little to do with whether or not we support a married priesthood, which is the focus of CORPUS. What I write about has so much more to do with secrets and how they affect our lives and how we live with our choices, and how we can make better choices.

I don’t know what many of the readers of CORPUS might feel about the subjects I deal with or even if they would be open to hearing about them? How would what I say compare with what you or your husbands believe about yourselves and your relationships? If you are out there what do you think about secret relationships? How has it affected your marriage?
You may feel less inclined to share and rather more inclined to tell me where to get off. I hope not and that maybe I will finally hear your voice.

Email me at eveapostle@yahoo.com . Hope to hear from you soon.

God bless!

Marcella Paliekara