A French diocese has dropped its claim to half an inheritance after the legal heir said the deceased priest involved was her father and a final will splitting the €450,000 sum between her and the Church had been signed under duress.
Isabelle Ballesteros took the Diocese of Perpignan in southern France to court to contest the final will, which she said was signed while her father was in a diocesan home for the elderly shortly before dying at 86 with Alzheimer's disease.
The previous will had recognised her as his child and made her the sole beneficiary, the first time he admitted that he was her father.
Bishop Thierry Scherrer only learned of the case when he arrived to head the diocese last month, and immediately renounced the diocese's claim to half the inheritance.
“It was a way to emerge from this silence, to say I exist, this is my father, he was a priest, and I am proud of all this,” said Ballesteros, a 42-year-old music teacher and mother of two children.
“It's not just about money, it's about recognition,” she told French television.
“I felt betrayed by the Church because they also stole my father from me on a daily basis during my childhood.”
Ballesteros, active in a group called “The Children of Silence” that opposes clerical celibacy, needed two years of legal wrangling before a court ruled the final will invalid because it was signed under duress.
The diocese said in a statement that the new bishop had “decided to renounce the legacy purely and simply” and did not want to add to the suffering the family had already gone through.
Ballesteros said she first met her father, Fr Lucien Camps, when she was six years old. He regularly visited her and her mother, often staying on Saturday night and saying Mass on Sunday.
He took them on holidays abroad and even discreetly attended her wedding in 2006. But when they went to a restaurant or the cinema, it was always dozens of kilometres away from Perpignan. If he did meet someone he knew, he introduced Isabelle as his god-daughter.
“Every bishop of Perpignan knew about it, from my birth right up until the last one,” she told the magazine Le Point.
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