I know a priest who tends to say “Greetings, child of God!” but he only uses it on adult friends and it is just his irony-brushed style. My current pastor appears to call children “buddy”. He’s from Brooklyn with the accent to match.
Perhaps if we got a social worker to hold a doll, we might get children to tell us how they were talked to by the priest.
Or maybe its a case of “Oh no he never called me my son, while he was buggering me senseless !”
Wait what?
Is that true?
No, but it does narrow down which church **thelurkinghorror **learned from.
Most “Hollywood Catholics” do it left to right.
More information with a generous dose of WTF here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpRzqXG1dhc
Never had a priest say “My son/My child” to me. Couldn’t speak for Irish accents since all the priests I can think of were of Polish lineage.
nope. I’ve only ever heard that on TV/radio/film, where the “priest” uttering those phrases inevitably also had an Irish accent.
“My child” no, Irish yes. The longtime Monsignor at my parents’ church is an Irishman.
I’ve never heard a priest call anyone “child” or “son” and I have known many priests. I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic university.
I don’t recall “my child” or “my son,” either, although I wouldn’t say I’m 100% sure. Just 99%. My parish was mostly Polish priests. We did have a Father Killian, who you would probably think was Irish but, no. Heavy Polish accent, first name Waldemar.
Whole family born & bread Roman Catholics.
Two uncles = priests.
Not a ‘buggering’ in the bunch.
My grade school church pastor was full on Irish… No buggering from him either.
I seem to have missed all the fun…
Never had one call me son but when I was studying for my confirmation one called me a bastard. My mother divorced her abusive first husband 10 years before she met and married my dad.
Dad was not very happy and we only went back once so that he could put a strongly worded letter in the collection plate.
Yes and no. I’ve met priests who called people “my son, my daughter, queen, king, love, sweetheart”… but because that’s common in our area among, well, everybody - it’s a conversational filler. We had a nun from a different part of Spain who found it scandalous at first to hear everybody calling everybody else “sweetheat” and “love” - after two years, she called everybody (male or female) “queen”. It was just a meaningless filler; in the same conversation, I could easily call the priest “child”, “love” or “son”.
What I haven’t encountered was those paternalistic “aaah, my chiiild” from the movies you talk about, when the priest is about to get Ex Cathedra and you kind of wonder why he doesn’t just start levitating on a puffy cloud held up by two fat little angels.
I thought the priest with Irish accent cliche died off with Bing Crosby. Are there recent examples of that in the media? None of our priests when I was growing up had one, though we did have a Portuguese father once.
And no, I don’t remember ever being referred to as “my child.”
But not necessarily a “second language accent”, it could very easily have been only a regional accent. Being Basque is not the same as having Basque as your native language: in fact, at least half of us Basque don’t speak Basque and many of those who do are truly bilingual and have no “foreign” accent in either language…
I’ve known several priests who fit what I call the “Father McIrish,” physical stereotype, complete with accent.
Never once been called “My child,” or “My son.”
I’ve known priests with Irish accents, but no “my child” in the bunch. Most of the accents I’ve heard recently by priests are Indian. It’s sometimes hard to concentrate on the Mass when the priest sounds like Apu from The Simpsons.
StG
This is inappropriate, and threadshitting. Don’t do it again.
I grew up Catholic and still occasionally come across a Catholic priest while attending church-related events (mostly funerals these days. Sigh.) I don’t ever recall being called “my son” or “my child” and the only priest I can remember who had an Irish accent was a distant relative who had come to Calgary to visit our extended family years ago from county Cork.
I have met a handful of priests with strong Filipino accents, however. That seems to be a pretty popular thing around these parts for some reason.
I’m a faithful Catholic, and go to church every week, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been called “my child” or “my son” by any priest I’ve known. Then again, I’m 36, and maybe if I was older I might have encountered a priest who talked like that.
We had young hippe priest Fr. Reilly, with the map or Ireland for a face; and elderly Fr. DeLeighton (from his name, I assume his family in Ireland since the Normans), who still wore skirts and was straight out of central casting as “Maynoonth Priest Type.”
As Going My Way as that, still never “That’ll be all faive decades o’ the rosary, me son! And we’ll have no more feelthy talk of sexual inter-kearse!”