Thirty years after his birth, a Kenyan man seeks confirmation that his father was an Italian priest who had a relationship with a 16-year-old girl.
SAMBURU, Kenya — When Sabina Losirkale went into labor, her sister Scolastica recalls, priests and religious sisters filled the delivery ward waiting to see the color of the baby’s skin — and if their worst fears had come to pass.A nun screamed. The boy was white — “a mzungu child,” Scolastica said, using Kiswahili slang.The shame that brought this baby into the world: An Italian missionary priest, her family alleges, impregnated this Kenyan girl when she was just 16.
“According to my birth certificate, it is like I am living a wrong life, a lie,” he said. “I just want to have my identity, my history.”Amid the torrent of sex abuse accusations that have rocked the priesthood, little attention has been paid to the pregnancies resulting from those illicit acts. And nowhere is this a more glaring issue than in Africa.
The Rev. Mario Lacchin encountered Sabina Losirkale when she was a student at the Gir Gir Primary School in Archer’s Post, a dusty town on the highway to Ethiopia. The school was established by the Consolata Missionaries religious order, which had come to Archer’s Post to spread the faith to the semi-nomadic tribes of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley.
Lacchin was quietly transferred to a nearby mission; his driver and a catechist at Archer’s Post, Benjamin Ekwam, was chosen to marry Sabina.“You know, it was very shameful in the community,” Scolastica said. “If someone wanted a child, a girl, they just married. So this was just an embarrassment to the whole community.”
In recent months, he has forwarded three such cases to the Vatican: those of Erebon and of children born of a 17-year-old in Cameroon and a 15-year-old in the United Kingdom. The flouting of celibacy vows among African clergy is no secret to the Vatican. Nearly every time a group of African bishops visited the Vatican during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, he would remind them of the need to train their priests to “embrace the gift of celibacy,” a reminder not often given to other bishops’ conferences, according to a review of his speeches to more than a dozen African bishops’ conferences.
Her mother initially pushed her away, but eventually told her that “Dad to Gerald is a priest called Father Mario and he is not here.”“Now that my days are over,” her sister told her, she could reveal all: “When Gerald will ask you who’s his father, just tell him: Father Mario.” “Ever since I knew you as my real biological father, I could not stop asking myself questions as to why I was born the way I was born, which consequently had put hate in me against you,” Erebon wrote.
Doyle immediately contacted the Rome-based superior of the Consolata Missionaries, the Rev. Stefano Camerlengo, who sent a top official to investigate. The order arranged three meetings over the past year between Erebon and Lacchin in Nairobi, in what Camerlengo told Doyle was an effort at facilitating dialogue between the two.
He added that there was no reference in the Consolata’s archives to any problem with Lacchin in Archer’s Post, though an official history of the order in Kenya makes a cryptic reference to him in an entry about scandals involving some missionaries.
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