My Father the Father
Thomas S. Sullivan
Thomas S. Sullivan was one of the thousands of priests in the Catholic Church who has had a child. Sullivan, born in 1908 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was working in a parish in Buffalo, New York, when he had an affair that ultimately led to the birth of a son, Jim Graham. Jim never met his father, who died in 1993 at age eighty-five.
i grew up in a small house—just one floor, with a basement and an attic—in a lower-middle-class neighborhood thirty minutes from downtown Buffalo. There were a lot of people in that house: John Graham, the man I called “Dad”; his sister, Kathryn; their parents, Stella and Otto Graham; and me and my two sisters, Joan and Connie.
I thought this was my family. Stella held us all together. She cooked, cleaned, cut the grass, did everything. She didn’t say much; she just worked. Dad ran a gas station in Buffalo. I lived with the Grahams until I was eighteen, when I moved to New York City. Their home was a depressing place. My sisters and I took to calling ourselves the Grims.
My dad did not like me and treated me poorly. He was a burly, gruff, rough guy, and I was afraid of him. We barely spoke. There were no pictures of our mother in the house. It was just understood that we didn’t talk about her or communicate with her. At the age of six, I got up enough courage to ask Dad what I should tell my friends who kept asking me about my mother. “Tell them she’s dead,” he said. She wasn’t.
I knew I had a mother because she’d send me beautiful Christmas packages and birthday cards. And I would see her twice a year, when she would visit for four consecutive days at Eastertime and in August. She could only see my sisters and me between 10:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., at Dad’s discretion. No overnights. She would pull up in front of the house, and my sisters and I would pile into her car to spend the day with her. When she and my father had gotten divorced, he had retained custody of us. When I asked my mother why, she explained that he had hired a powerful attorney. I came to find out that wasn’t exactly true. There was a powerful attorney—the legendary William Mahoney, head of the local Democratic Party in Erie County, New York, who had defended many high-profile clients, including members of the mafia—but my dad hadn’t hired him. The Catholic Church had.
I was forty-eight years old when I finally learned the truth of who my real father was. This was 1993, a full fourteen years after John Graham, the man who I thought was my father, had passed away and a month after my mother’s death. I was out to dinner with my wife. The conversation turned to the Grahams, and I remarked that my relationship with them had been strained since my father’s death.
“I’ll tell you why that is,” my wife said. “John wasn’t your father. Father Sullivan was.”
The secret had been revealed to her by John’s brother, Otto Jr., who’d been annoyed with me for complaining about the way I had been raised and thought the news would upset me. My wife had asked around for confirmation and gotten it from the other family members. That, with the help of a little vodka over dinner, was enough to prompt her to tell me.
I later confronted the Grahams. They were stone-faced for a while, then Kathryn slid an obituary across the kitchen table. It was Father Sullivan’s. “This man may have been your father, but only your mother, John, and Father Sullivan would know for sure, and they’re all dead,” Kathryn said. I peered at the photograph and the man staring back at me. I noticed the date. He had died just a few months earlier.
I desperately wanted to know more about this man, but the Church appeared determined to keep my parentage a secret. After a lot of detective work, however, I learned some of the details of my father’s life. Father Thomas S. Sullivan had taught theology at the seminary at Holy Angels parish in Buffalo. That’s where he met and started a relationship with my mother, who at the time was married to John, with whom she’d already had my sisters. Shortly after I was born, rumors started swirling throughout the parish that I looked more like Father Sullivan than I did John Graham. John was advised by the Church to move his family into his parents’ home so his mother could ensure that Father Sullivan didn’t come to visit me and my mother.
Jim (ten years old)
Father Sullivan, meanwhile, was transferred four hundred miles away to a church in Newburgh, New York. He disappeared from there a month later. Shortly after, my mother fled Buffalo with me, leaving my sisters behind, to meet up with him. They connected in Manhattan. My father had taken a job as a bartender and short-order cook and was living in an apartment on the West Side. My mother was living in the nurse’s quarters of the hospital where she worked. They put me in the New York Foundling Hospital, an orphanage, and paid two dollars a day to the Sisters of Charity to take care of me. I was there for thirteen months. My mother came on her day off, once a week, to take me out. Often my father would be waiting up the block to take over pushing my baby carriage.
Then on July 29, 1947, a group made up of private detectives, John, his brother, and a family friend, Pat Sheehy, found my mother and Father Sullivan in bed together in his apartment during a midnight “raid.” It was my second birthday. Once my father was found, the Church started the process of bringing him back into the fold. Despite his initial objections, he was sent to a rehabilitation camp in Essex, New York, called the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, where he spent sixteen years. Some priests referred to the facility as the Gulag, or Priest Prison. It’s where wayward priests were sent to serve their “sentence.”
The Church has never acknowledged that Sullivan was my father. However, on June 18, 2018, the day after Father’s Day, I was able to exhume his body for DNA testing and confirm it. The Church still does not want to admit what they did seventy years ago. But DNA doesn’t lie. My father was a priest, and the Church prevented me from knowing him. To me, Otto Jr.’s revelation, intended to be an act of retribution, was actually a gift. It was the key to solving all those childhood mysteries of why John was so cruel to me. Plus, had I not found out, my parents’ story never would have been uncovered.
I’ve learned a lot about my father and myself during this process. He had had a domineering mother who pushed him to get straight A’s and become the academic of the Oblate order. He had a quick wit. (Mine is the same.) My father had the same powerful voice I do. I have a booklet he wrote called “Our Lady of Hope” about an apparition of Mary in Pontmain, France, in 1871 that stopped a war. The booklet has been reprinted again and again. He was an eloquent writer. I know that not only from this pamphlet but from many of his letters, written to the General Superior in Rome during his time in the Gulag, asking to be reinstated with his full priestly rights. Though beautifully written, they are difficult for me to read, due to the subject matter.
I’m often asked what I have missed, not knowing my father. I wonder what it would have been like to be raised by him. He was a writer, a reader, a debater, an academic. My education would have been totally different. My father was all about higher learning. If I had had his mentoring, where would I have ended up? I’ll never know, and that’s a very painful answer. Nonetheless, I’m grateful that I finally verified the truth.