A Widowed Dad’s New Kind of Fatherhood

They fell in love on a hayride. It was 1947. They were both just kids, but he knew she was the one.

They spent the next 39 years together, rearing their six girls and loving each other. When she died, he thought he would never get over it. Then he found another kind of love.

Bob Murphy is still father to six children and grandfather to 12. But he is also “Father Bob” to 600 families at St. Joseph’s Church.

Now, instead of ministering to girls with scraped knees or broken hearts, he’s counseling parishioners. The transition seems to come easily for Murphy, a big ruddy-cheeked man who calls himself “the luckiest guy who ever lived.”

He says his years as a dad help him empathize with his flock because he has been through it all-- the financial struggles, the teenage rebellion, the angst of being a parent.

“You need to offer them a lot of understanding, and I think I can do that because of the life I’ve lived,” he says.

His daughters say his role as a priest has not changed his more traditional role as a father. He is still the one they go to for advice, the one whose example they follow when making decisions about their own children. He is also the one who makes sure they all get together as a family at least a few times a year, for holidays or long-weekend camping trips.

For him, the priesthood fulfills a dream he had as a young boy.

His parents were devout Catholics who gathered their 10 children in the living room every night to say the rosary.

When he was 15, he was awed by a young priest who visited his parish in Freeport, N.Y. He decided then that he wanted to be just like the Rev. Larry Byrne.

He enrolled in a seminary high school but, after a year, administrators told his parents he probably wasn’t mature enough to begin the long road to becoming a priest.

He abandoned the thought when he met Janet Sielcken, a sweet, dark-haired girl a few years behind him at Freeport High School.

She was 14; he was 17. She was kind and generous and laughed at his jokes. They dated for four years before he was drafted for the Korean War.

“As soon as I heard, I said, ‘I’ve got to marry this girl. There’s no way I’m going to leave her.’ ”

She was Lutheran but converted to Catholicism for him.

The first baby came 10 months after they were married in 1951: Christine, a beautiful girl with peach-fuzz hair and luminous blue eyes. Eleven months later, there was Kathy, followed by Gail, Patti, Karen and Cheryl.

He worked as a construction contractor. As he struggled to build his business, he spent most weekdays away from their home in New Jersey.

Janet stayed home with the kids. She made their clothes, took them to music lessons and spent hours making the perfect chicken fricassee.

Bob came home on weekends, then tried to cram a week of fathering into two days.

Sunday was always his favorite day. He would wait outside while Janet and the six girls finished getting ready for church. Then out the front door his daughters would come, in pastel dresses with white bows in their hair. “Each more beautiful than the next,” their father recalls.

After church, they went on long country drives, along the Delaware River or up through the Pocono Mountains, and stopped for dinner at a nice restaurant.

“I was always so proud,” Murphy says.

Life went on. There were backyard barbecues, sled rides, horseback-riding lessons and weekends at the Jersey shore. The girls became teenagers, and Bob and Janet dealt with six separate rebellions.

It wasn’t a perfect life. There were lean times. They had their arguments. Like most fathers, Murphy has regrets.

“They say they were afraid of me. I gave them a look and they knew I meant it,” he says. “I was too demanding and too hard, I guess. I missed a lot of the good years when I should have been there while the kids were growing up.”

As the girls married, Bob and Janet looked forward to retirement.

But in 1984, Janet found a lump in her breast. Two years later, she was gone.

Bob was devastated. He stopped working. Making money didn’t seem to matter anymore. Even now, almost 13 years after her death, his eyes fill with tears when he talks about her. “I still dream about her all the time,” he says.

His girls tried to help. They invited him to visit his grandkids. He went, but it wasn’t the same without Janet. Eventually he tried dating, but he was not happy with any other woman.

Then one day his brother Jerry, a former priest, suggested that he consider reviving his boyhood dream.

He thought about it but decided there were too many obstacles. He was 59 and hadn’t been to school in more than 40 years. His life with his family had made him so happy he couldn’t imagine anything better.

But the thought stayed with him, and a few months later he wrote to Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn. To his surprise, he was accepted. He spent the next four years earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in divinity.

When he first told his daughters he was going to become a priest, some of them thought he was crazy.

“I worried that his decision was based more on pure emotion and the loss of my mother,” said Patti, his fourth daughter. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, Dad, take some time and just make sure.’ ”

But he was sure. While in the seminary, he wrote his daughters a letter describing the joy he had found in this new kind of fatherhood:

“I am very happy with what I have decided to do. God has been good to me all my life. I had the best mother and father anyone could ask for. I had a most magnificent wife who taught me how to love, and I have the best children and grandchildren anyone could ask for. On top of that, God has called me to be His representative, for which I am not worthy. But, of course, you already knew that.”

All six daughters were there for his ordination in November 1993. He was 63.

They have all traveled from their homes up and down the East Coast to hear him say Mass at St. Joseph’s, a quaint 19th century church in the tiny town of Chester, on the Connecticut River.

His firstborn, Christine, says her father has found peace after years of turmoil over her mother’s death.

“After she died, he wrote us all a letter and he said, ‘The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.’ That’s what he gave to us, and now he’s giving love to other people through the church,” she said.

People he meets are sometimes shocked when the man in the Roman collar mentions his children.

“People say, ‘How can you have children? I thought you were a Catholic priest,’ ” he says.

Although the vast majority of priests have never been married, it is not as unusual as it once was for a widower to join the priesthood, according to the U.S. Catholic Conference, which could provide no numbers.

In a class of 22 at Holy Apostles seminary, which caters to older applicants, Murphy was one of five widowers with children.

Members of Murphy’s parish say his years as the other kind of father show in his family-oriented sermons and the special benedictions he gives small children.

“Because he’s had that experience as a dad,” says parishioner Mary Breckbill, “he can speak from the heart.”