A BBC radio documentary on the thousands of children fathered by catholic priests has won this year’s journalism prize at the Sandford St Martin Trust awards, which recognise excellence in religious broadcasting.
Hidden Children of the Church focused on the stories of three children of Catholic priests and how they dealt with the secrecy around their father’s true identity.
Psychotherapist Vincent Doyle, who founded Coping International, a support group for children of catholic priests, was at the heart of the award-winning BBC documentary. He learned when he was 28 that his godfather, Fr John Doyle, a Spiritan, was actually his father.
Speaking to The Tablet about the award, Vincent Doyle said Coping International had seen “a spike in online access since the pandemic began, which coincided with the airing of the documentary”.
Since then, around 46,000 people have logged on to the organisation’s website from the United Kingdom, placing it in the top 3 per cent of countries accessing Coping International since March 2020.
“I credit the documentary with a large portion of that spike. One woman, on Skype, cried for almost three hours. ‘I never told anyone,’ she whispered from her living-room in northern Scotland to me, as her entire body shook with psychosomatic relief, as decades-old tension left her gently. She was stuck to the chair, she told me, as she listened to the documentary. The bells, the plane, Rome, and the Vatican all seemed as if they were speaking to her.”
Vincent Doyle paid tribute to BBC producer Dan Tierney who had “traversed the cobbled streets of Rome” and gone inside the Vatican in search of answers with Doyle.
“His journalistic style was marked by that unquenchable thirst for truth, alongside respect for his surroundings.”
The award marked the end of a happy week for Doyle, who has just got engaged and will marry his fiancée in September.
“I am notoriously determined, but behind me is the most beautiful woman, Emer. We will be married within a few months God willing, plans are being put in place.
“When Coping International was nothing but a jumbled-up plan upon scattered laptops, phones, and prayer in a rented apartment in Galway, she believed in this project and the dignity of those it could help. This woman has agreed to become my wife, and of all the blessings I have ever received, truly this is beyond all I believed God could have given, for, only God could have created such a being as her.”
The Sandford St Martin Trust awards was held online for the second year running due to the ongoing Covid restrictions.
Other winners included an Al Jazeera documentary Ashes to Ashes about racist violence in the United States; Psalm 23, a UK Jewish Film for YouTube; Radio Wanna, a religious service broadcast on prison radio by the HM Prison Wandsworth Chaplaincy Team, which both received the trustees’ community award. Channel 4 drama series, It’s a Sin, exploring the 1980s AIDS crisis, won the Radio Times readers’ award.
The BBC programme Burnley Crisis, on the work of Rev Alex Frost, Vicar of St Matthew’s, Burnley, and Street Pastor, Mick Fleming, whose charitable organisations support the poor and isolated in their community, won the trustees’ content award.
“When it comes to educating the public and building community, there is nothing to compare with broadcasting and journalism,” said the chair of the Sandford St Martin Trust, Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley of Ripon. “During a year when so many of us were stuck in one place, public-service broadcasting played a critical role.”
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