Priestdaddy

This summer, I am receiving the new chapters I commissioned for my collection, Married Catholic Priests. While focusing strongly on Eastern Catholic history and experience, it also includes chapters by and about married Catholic clergy in the ordinariates created in 2009 for Anglicans entering the Church; and several chapters also from married Orthodox clergy, whose own experiences shed welcome light on Anglican and Eastern Catholic ones. And between now and, I hope, the early fall, I shall have all the revisions requested by the reviewers complete and be ready to send the thing back to the Press for the final stages.

As editor of that collection, I'm greatly looking forward to reading a unique contribution to the discussion in the form of Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood.

About this book the publisher tells us

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met—a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates “like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.” His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church’s country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents’ rectory, their two worlds collide.

In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence—from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group—with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents’ household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother.

Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.