Ambivalence and Devotion

Karen E. Park explores Kristin Grady Gilger’s “mother memoir” about her son’s most troubling decision: to become a Catholic priest.

By Karen E. ParkDecember 4, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

WE ARE LIVING through a “Catholic moment” in the United States. With the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to wear the Piscatory Ring (and perhaps the first Chicago White Sox fan in the Vatican), global interest in American Catholicism is unusually high. At the same time, a growing traditionalist movement has gained prominence, with conservative converts ranging from Candace Owens to J. D. Vance. As in American politics, so in the pews: Catholic life feels polarized into red and blue, right and left. Yet Catholicism resists neat classification. To belong to the church is to live in tension.

Kristin Grady Gilger’s new book My Son, the Priest: A Mother’s Crisis of Faith takes up this struggle in intimate form. Gilger, a journalist and lapsed Catholic, watches with anxiety as her son Patrick discerns a vocation with the Jesuits. The result is a frank and affecting memoir that braids together family history, investigative reporting, and theological questioning. At its heart lies a universal parental dilemma: how to love a child whose choices don’t align with the vision his mother had for him.

The book begins with a home visit from the priest who comes to talk to the Gilger family about 20-year-old Patrick’s desire to join the Jesuit Order. Gilger says of the casual “Father Saz” (as the students call him), who shows up to the house in a red convertible: “He’s a recruiter, I thought. He could be representing a college football team or the United States Army. He’s got Patrick all but signed, sealed, and delivered […] I wondered if he got a bonus for every man—or boy—he signed.”

Gilger’s protectiveness is understandable and recognizable to any mother who has tried to protect her child from the dangerous or unsavory forces of the world. Gilger is a hard sell. She tells the recruiter, who is there “hawking a lifetime of poverty, chastity, and obedience,” that she left the Catholic Church after Patrick turned seven because she couldn’t tolerate the way the church treats women. Saz isn’t surprised, and in fact agrees that “there’s a lot” wrong with the church. Patrick, it turns out, is going into this with his eyes wide open, which somehow makes it even harder.

Patrick’s novitiate—first training period, before initial vows—lasts for two years. During this time, as is customary, he sets out on a pilgrimage. The Jesuits provide him with nothing but $35 and a one-way bus ticket and tell him to come back in a month. Patrick travels to New York City, gives his money away to anyone who asks, and relies on the kindness of strangers. This pilgrimage is only the beginning of many more years of discernment and formation, a process that leads him to Loyola University in Chicago, where he studies philosophy, and to the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota. Here he falls in love with a woman and seriously considers leaving the order.

Patrick brings his parents out to meet the woman, who is a member of the lay organization Jesuit Volunteer Corps. His Jesuit superiors are unalarmed by the development. In fact, they tell him, “if you’re living the Jesuit life well—if you’re interacting with other people in meaningful ways, if you’re living in the real world—you’re going to fall in love.” After much uncertainty, Patrick chooses the Jesuits over married life. Having known both deep love and deep pain, he believes he can now be a better priest. What emerges is not a portrait of Jesuits as saints untouched by human feeling but of men who are fully human, who choose a difficult path again and again.

Gilger describes the humorous daily irritations of communal living: “Priests, it turns out, can be just as eccentric, sloppy, petty, boring, and annoying as anyone else.” Some never empty the dishwasher, some tell endless stories, and some finish the box of crackers and put the empty box back in the cupboard. But beauty dwells there too. Gilger recalls once spotting her son and one of his Jesuit brothers taking turns gently shaving the backs of each other’s necks. Gilger suggests that celibacy does not deny intimacy and masculinity but reframes them.

She goes on an Ignatian retreat to understand Jesuit spirituality. (Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits, is the author of the Spiritual Exercises, a handbook that forms the core of Jesuit life.) She finds the imaginative exercises “silly.” In a moment of frustration, she breaks the rules and calls her son to tell him the retreat “is not working.” He responds with both “a blessing and a rebuke”: God is the most important thing in his life, and it hurts him that his parents don’t try harder to understand.

Gilger remains ambivalent about the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse casts a long shadow, of course. She cannot accept, on moral grounds, the church’s teachings on birth control, abortion, or women’s ordination. Nor does she wish to be a “cafeteria Catholic,” picking and choosing those doctrines she can tolerate and ignoring the rest. This feels like cheating to her. But over time (the book covers over two decades), she does return to the Catholic Church, to the sacraments and faith of her troubled family of origin—recognizing, with her son, that there is grace to be found there.

In the end, My Son, the Priest is less a memoir of conversion than one of mutual acceptance: between mother and son, doubt and faith, ambivalence and devotion. Gilger never resolves her unease with Catholic teaching, nor does she pretend to. But she does learn to appreciate the beauty her son finds in the church: its history, its liturgy, its ability to offer both courage and wonder. In a time when American Catholicism is as polarized as the culture around it, Gilger offers no easy answers. What she offers instead is rarer: an honest account of trying to remain open, of saying yes where she can, and of loving through deep differences.