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Father
Figures
Scandals
add to pressure for reform of Catholic Church.
By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet
EDITOR'S NOTE: This national story is running in
at least 30 alternative newsweeklies this week, from Seattle to Sarasota,
each with a local angle. While mainstream media have been focusing
on priests and sex abuse, this story looks at the crisis of values
in the church, and the possibilities for reform that the scandals
have engendered. All of the local stories will be compiled and available
to read at www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=35
When
Charles Ara fell in love at the age of 39 he faced an anguished choice.
As a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, he had taken a vow
of celibacy. But after working alongside the 28-year-old religion
educator in his parish for almost three years, he felt that his vows
had become impossible to live out honestly.
"I struggled with that decision," he says. "I agonized
over it for about a year. It was probably very unfair to my wife-to-be,
to ask her to wait while I worked through my own issues."
Ultimately, Charles Ara, who still calls himself Father,
says, "I decided to add love and marriage to my priesthood."
The church did not look kindly on Ara's decision.
"The pastor announced that no one could attend my wedding," Ara says.
"A bishop told my parents they could not attend."
But on the day of the ceremony, at a parishioner's
home, his parents were not the only faithful who made the decision
to support Ara. Hundreds of uninvited parishioners showed up. On Oct.
10, 1970, more than 300 Catholics watched as several married priests,
one Orthodox priest, one Episcopalian and a group of nuns presided
over the marriage of Charles Ara and Shirley Meyers. The wedding party
ran out of food, what with the unexpected turnout, but the guitar
music from the '60s played on.
While the church does not recognize him as such, Ara,
a father of four, still considers himself a Roman Catholic priest.
"It affected my faith," Ara says. "But I will always love my church,
and my faith." Ara now works as a marriage and family counselor. He
does seem to miss the leadership role he had as a priest, though —
he's running for Congress.
Ara is one of approximately 100,000 men worldwide
who have left the Roman Catholic priesthood, many of them in order
to marry. In the U.S. there are as many as 20,000 married priests
(conservative estimates put the number lower; there exists no official
figure). Thousands of these men have taken a certain Canonical law
to heart: Once a priest, always a priest.
Despite the fact that the church hierarchy no longer
recognizes their right to officiate, they still perform weddings,
baptisms, and even the occasional mass. The church may have turned
its back on them, but these men still have hope for the church. They
represent an organized, vocal and dedicated group at the margins of
Catholic life in the U.S. and Europe. They may even represent the
church's best hope for the future.
Moral
Authority
Today's Catholic Church has been
watching its moral authority erode with every damaging headline about
sexual abuse by its priests. The church's veil of secrecy —
including keeping victims quiet with expensive settlements and shuffling
abusers quietly from parish to parish — has exploded in its
face. That known child molesters were quietly shifted around within
the church throws a criminal taint onto the entire hierarchy. And
the irony is not lost on married priests: While they neither harmed
minors nor lied about their sexual choices, the church abandoned them,
often dramatically, at the same time that it shielded sexual predators.
The scandal is bringing new, intense pressure to bear
on an organization with a long history of dedicated resistance to
change. But resistance may be wavering. Gallup polls show that three
out of four Catholics in America believe the church has been handling
the scandals badly. And in June, at a conference in Dallas, Texas,
the bishops' statements showed that they are more sensitive than ever
to public opinion. On July 20, Voice of the Faithful, www.voiceofthefaithful.org,
an influential new lay organization, is holding a conference in Boston
in an attempt to galvanize further change and provide a forum for
the Catholic public. The bishops will be paying attention.
"The space holds 5,000 and we are expecting to fill
it," says Mike Emerton, a VOTF spokesperson. Besides supporting victims
of abuse and priests of integrity, VOTF's primary goal is to push
for the laity's inclusion in church governance.
There's a lot more at stake than just arcane questions
of church governance. The laity's role is crucial: It's the central
axis that connects a host of hot-button issues for Catholic America
— optional celibacy for priests, birth control and the ordination
of women.
"The underpinning of all this is really a level of
diametric opposition of two totally different world views about what
the church is supposed to be," says Russ Ditzel, an activist for a
priesthood of single and married men and women with the Corps of Reserve
Priests United for Service (CORPUS). "It's a clash of the church as
the people of God, and as a hierarchical, structured organization."
If the church is forced to listen to the laity, optional
celibacy for Catholic priests — which massive numbers of Catholics
have supported in numerous polls and surveys — is likely to
be one of the first items on the agenda.
While optional celibacy is at best a remote possibility
under the current Pope, in many ways it is one of the least controversial
issues. Celibacy is not dogma; it's a rule passed in the 12th century.
And the Catholic Church already has married priests — scores
of Anglican priests who were allowed to switch to Roman Catholicism,
even though they were already married. Homosexuality, for example,
is a much more explosive topic, despite the fact that some experts
believe that as much as 30 percent of the Catholic priesthood is gay.
Priest Shortage
Added urgency comes from another unavoidable
Catholic crisis: a shortage of celebate priests. In 1975, America
had 60,000 Catholic priests; by 2001 there were just over 45,000.
Their numbers continue to decline at a rate of about 12 percent a
year. For individual regions, the burn rates translate into dramatic
declines: In 1966 in Chicago, there were 1,340 priests. That number
has now dropped to 657.
The numbers in the seminaries are even more dire.
While there were around 47,000 seminarians in 1965, in 1997 there
were only 5,000 (according to figures cited by Chester Gillis in
Roman Catholicism in America, from the Columbia Contemporary American
Religion series). Ironically, the ranks of Catholics in the U.S. are
growing, swelling with an influx of Catholic immigrants from Latin
America.
To put it baldly, the American priest appears to be
a dying breed. But if the church were to welcome back its married
priests, it could increase its ranks by as much as a quarter.
"The priesthood is going downhill fairly fast," says
Dean Hoge, a sociologist and former priest at the Catholic University
of America. "The crisis over sexual misconduct only makes things a
little worse." Hoge helped conduct a 1987 study that polled Catholic
undergraduate students at Catholic schools around the country. "We
concluded that you would have a four-fold increase in seminarians
if you had optional celibacy. It's the biggest deterrent."
"There is no shortage of priests," says Charles Ara.
"They're not using the priests they already have. I get referrals
from parish priests," he adds. "If for some technicality they can't
do it, they don't have a problem referring people to me."
Apart and Above
Only about half of both homosexual and heterosexual
priests "in good standing" with the church are actually practicing
celibacy, according to A.W. Richard Sipe, former priest and author
of Sex, Priests and Power. At any one time, according to his
surveys of priests, he estimates that as much as 20 percent of priests
are involved in ongoing sexual relationships with adult women.
"This sense that priests are set apart and above,"
Sipe says, "I think that erects a structure for duplicity. This is
why many priests, who are still priests, lead double lives. They're
good men, and they do good things, but they have a woman in another
town, or have affairs or relationships with a man — or in the
worst cases relationships with children — that are contrary
to what they say and stand for in their official lives."
Priests who marry, on the other hand, are priests
who are unwilling to lie. "My experience with priests who marry is
a desire for honesty," Sipe says. "They can't or won't lead a double
life, they sacrifice the security of the priesthood, their employment,
their livelihood, status — all of that."
Most married priests, especially those organized into
groups pressing for reform like CORPUS or Call to Action, are straightforward
about who they are. Some are uncomfortable with the idea of practicing,
especially with the idea of charging for services not recognized by
the church. But many others are hungry for reform. Several hundred
are listed online in a regional database run by a group called Celibacy
Is The Issue (CITI) at www.Rentapriest.com. That Web site trumpets
"We married Roman Catholic Priest/couples invite you to receive the
Sacraments. COME AS YOU ARE!"
CITI was founded by a laywoman named Louise Haggett,
who was moved to action when she couldn't find a priest to minister
to her dying mother. "Mom never saw a priest until she was practically
comatose in the hospital," Haggett says. "I felt so betrayed by the
church." "The disciples were married men," she says. "If the Berlin
wall came down, why can't celibacy be abolished?" Convinced married
priests would solve the shortage, she started a one-woman campaign
to restore credibility to them.
By her own account, Haggett has been succeeding. Hundreds
of married priests across the country are performing weddings and
baptisms regularly, even stepping in to give mass if the regular priest
is not available. The Catholic system allows for lay people to carry
out many parish duties, but only ordained priests can give the sacraments.
"There are 5,300 parishes without a resident pastor,"
says Haggett. Married priests, she says, are bound to fill those holes.
"Canon 843: No priest can refuse sacramental ministry to anyone who
asks," Haggett recites. "Canon 290: Once a priest, always a priest."
Not everyone agrees with Haggett's analysis, or even
with her numbers. "I'm not denying it's a serious problem," says Mary
Gautier, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research
in the Apostolate, at Georgetown University (CARA). "I just don't
think there's a crisis."
Doing away with celibacy, Gautier says, would not
solve the problem. "The seminaries would not fill up tomorrow with
young men," she says. "It would have some impact but it's a larger
issue." She describes the larger issue as "more of a generational
thing." "Young people are not making long-term commitments to anything,"
Gautier says. She admits, however, that her belief is not based on
any particular study, but on her perception of young people today.
But most sociologists agree that the Catholic Church
is facing a crisis. Eight years ago, Richard Schoener and Lawrence
A. Young wrote in Full Pews, Empty Altars, "At least among
Christians in this country, the paucity of pastors in contrast with
the steady growth in church membership is a crisis unique to Roman
Catholicism." Since that book, was published, things have only grown
worse.
Days
of Vatican II
CORPUS is the oldest reform group in the
country, organized after the Second Vatican Council in 1974. "CORPUS
is the only reform group that's been in dialogue with so many hierarchies
around the world," says past president and active reformist Dr. Anthony
Padovano. "They see us as the representative of married priests. CORPUS
tries to speak within the church for change."
Still a prominent Catholic, Padovano fits one of the
most common profiles of married Roman Catholic priests in America.
He studied in Rome for six years, and was ordained in 1960, just before
the Second Vatican Council. The documents issued by Vatican II marked
an important sea change in Catholic attitudes. After Vatican II, priests
faced their audiences; they said mass in the language of the people.
Vatican II promised a more open church, one more inclusive and responsive
to the laity.
"That was the most moving gathering of God's people,"
Padovano remembers. "I know most Catholics don't want to go back to
the kind of church we were before."
Padovano is one of many priests who were ordained
in the years surrounding Vatican II, swept up in that era's hope and
idealism. According to figures from the Official Catholic Registry,
the years between 1965 and 1975 showed a significant upturn in the
numbers of both priests and seminarians. Father Charles Ara, in Cerritos,
remembers sitting 100 feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. during
his "I have a dream" speech. Other married priests tell stories of
being arrested, or sprayed with water hoses, during those tumultuous
years.
The priesthood was a perfect logical choice for idealistic
young men in the '60s. The Catholic Church has a long history of advocating
for the poor and the victimized — from the Jesuits in the 18th
century who stood up for the indigenous Indians, to Maryknoll priests
who stood up for the rights of the Japanese-American community during
the internment camps, to liberation theologians in the 1970s, the
list goes on.
Dr. Padovano says that without a doubt, the married
priests he knows come from that legion of priests inspired by Vatican
II and deeply dedicated to ideals of social justice.
In
1975, America had 60,000 Catholic priests; by 2001 there were
just over 45,000. Their numbers continue to decline at a rate
of about
12 percent a year. |
The eventual choice to leave the priesthood, for many
of these men, was a wrenching decision. "It's very difficult to leave
something you love for reasons that don't make sense to you," Padovano
says. "In my years of working with married priests, the harder it
is for you to resign, the better your marriage is going to be. That
relationship must mean an enormous amount to you, if you are willing
to put on the line something that was your whole life. I never, even
for a second, regretted what I did. I never questioned it, never thought
what I did was wrong. But I was just ... sorry, that I could not continue
my work, only because I wanted to marry a woman that I loved.
"That was one of the more difficult things to try
to understand, why marriage to a Catholic woman, to raise a Catholic
family, would make me ineligible to practice the priesthood fully,
especially when Christ chose married men to be his apostles."
Padovano and his wife, Theresa, married in 1974. At
the time Theresa was a nun, and a graduate student in his class. "I'm
still crazy about her," he says. "She's extraordinary. Thank God I
didn't miss her. It would have been sinful for me to walk away from
her. I think she was really a gift."
The
Afterlife
Father Joseph O'Rourke, who lives in Chicago,
worked with the peace movement in the '60s and was once arrested for
burning Dow Chemical files on the company's front lawn. He got into
trouble with the church when he baptized a baby whose 19-year-old
mother had expressed her belief in reproductive rights and family
planning. The church had refused the child baptism, but O'Rourke stepped
in and performed the ceremony on the steps of the parish church. "That
got me into a lot of trouble," he says. He was expelled from the Jesuit
order before he chose to marry.
Says Russ Ditzel of CORPUS, "My primary reason for
transitioning was the lifestyle we were required to live; it was so
isolated," he says. "I found that it distanced me from the people
I was supposed to be serving. That was a period of time when we were
still trying to live out the expectations coming out of the Second
Vatican Council."
Robert McClory, a former priest, journalism professor
and author of a book about change and the Catholic Church says, "I
left partly to get married, partly because of dissatisfaction with
the church on issues like birth control. I wasn't comfortable being
the official proclaimer of doctrines that I couldn't in good conscience
ask people to follow."
For priests like this, the desire to marry was just
the final expression of larger philosophical differences.
"There's no real justification any longer for exclusive
and autocratic government in the Catholic Church," says O'Rourke,
62. Father O'Rourke couches the debate as a fight for human rights
against a paternalistic, patriarchal organization that is wasting
its potential as an important moral leader in society.
"The church could become the most powerful spokesperson
for religious liberty," he says "for constitutional and human rights.
You can find this in Catholic social thought, in its advocacy of economic
as well as political rights, that we feel so strongly about."
It seems clear that these men not only represent a
sheer numerical loss for the Catholic priesthood, but also a huge
loss of talent, dedication and faith. While the church may not yet
have recognized that loss, many lay people have.
Paul Lencioni, a 38-year-old developer for Cisco systems,
was married by Father O'Rourke, and O'Rourke baptized both of his
children.
It doesn't bother Lencioni that Father O'Rourke no
longer has the right, within the church, to perform these sacraments.
"Celibacy is a dated concept," Lencioni says. "It should be abolished."
In some paradoxical way, married priests may be doing
the Catholic Church a favor. Married priests create a space that many
Catholics trust, and feel is still Catholic, outside of some of the
church's teachings. "We're the sheepdogs," says O'Rourke.
Lencioni articulates the kind of internal reconciliation
that many Catholics have been making for years. Many of the church's
teachings, especially around personal issues like birth control and
divorce, have proved impossible for modern Catholics to live by.
"I think it's OK to blend different philosophies in
your own faith, and sometimes we have to do that," Lencioni says.
"Sometimes, when you make those reconciliations, your faith is stronger.
It's that versus being unhappy with your church and moving away from
it. I don't think that, ultimately, is a positive outcome."
"When I see the church today, I see masses that are
poorly attended, I see people who are disgruntled. A lot of that has
to do with the need for some more open thinking," says Lencioni.
On July 20, Voice of the Faithful will gather the
faithful from across the nation in an attempt to move the Catholic
Church closer to the more open vision of Vatican II, toward its potential
as a church of the people. Married priests will certainly be in attendance.
It remains to be seen whether they will be heard.
Crossing Over
Eugene
priest has followed a circuitous path. By Bobbie Willis
God speaks to Jerry Schindler,
and Jerry Schindler listens. As a result, Schindler, 66, is now a
happily married Catholic priest running a small business called Immaculate
Carpet Cleaning.
Schindler and I sit in a corner booth at Jamie's Burgers
on Chambers. He is slim and clean-cut, dressed in sharp, dark blue
jeans with a white T-shirt, a two-inch crucifix on a long, plain chain
around his neck, and Birkenstock-style double-strapped sandals on
his feet. Here is a man who, because of God, has traveled a circuitous,
but fulfilling Catholic path in life.
As a child in the rural area north of Salem, Schindler
walked every morning to serve as an altar boy in his local parish.
He says, "I started seminary my first year in high school, when I
was 14." Such a young age at which to dedicate the rest of one's life
to anything, even God. But Schindler says, "I remember walking to
church, and these questions came to me: 'What do I want to do with
my life? What does the world need today? What can I do about this?'
And I answered, 'I want to make my life worthwhile. The world needs
God. And I can become a priest.'"
He spent 12 years in seminary, studying the rules
of an ordered life and learning discipline. Schindler admits, "The
big discipline was with celibacy. I had to deal with that for a couple
of years …" It wasn't so much the physical relationships that
concerned him but whether or not he could live a life without partnership,
without companionship. "But," Schindler says, "it was settled for
me in my 10th year. I remembered the scripture 'Seek first the kingdom
of God …' I read that scripture for days until I had a real
peace in my heart, knowing this was what God wanted me to do and God
was going to help me."
Schindler was ordained in 1961 at age 26 and spent
five years in the active priesthood. In 1965, while in Portland, Schindler
was invited to listen to a Pentecostal minister who had been an observer
at the Consul in Rome. The life-changing message of this talk was
"… the total surrender to Jesus the baptizer in the Holy Spirit."
Schindler shakes his head and says, "I went home that night, knelt
down before the tabernacle and said, 'Lord, I'm thinking about my
life, and I'm about 85 percent surrendered. But 100 percent scares
the socks off of me …'"
He grappled with the doubt and thought he had wrestled
it. But he says things started to change after that. He found himself
coming back again and again to the scripture, "Now go sell all you
have and follow me …" Taking this as his next cue from God,
Schindler made the decision to take a year's leave of absence. He
sold what few possessions he had and moved to Portland, working for
room and board in one of the poorer neighborhood churches. During
this time, Schindler finally came to grips with the fact that he desired
marriage as part of his life.
He took a second year's leave of absence during which
he met a woman. She was a nun who had been struggling through a very
tough time in her own vocation. God spoke again to Schindler, and
he and this woman eventually decided to get married. Schindler admits
he had apprehensions — they had both gone through such changes,
and hers had been more dramatic. "But I knew her heart," he says.
"Her heart was right. Her heart was good."
Schindler's life became complicated in the ways any
normal person's life becomes complicated over the years: That first
marriage did not work out. After 17 years, and for reasons Schindler
doesn't go into, he and his wife had their marriage annulled. In 1988,
Schindler remarried and has remained happily so these last 14 years.
Schindler is now a laicized priest, meaning he keeps
the title ("Once a priest, always a priest," according to the Canon
Code of Law), but he cannot perform the sacraments outside of emergency
situations. Schindler makes his current living though his small business,
Immaculate Carpet Cleaning. He prayed for help with the name, and
God guided him to the Blessed Virgin — also known as the Immaculate
Heart. His business card has "immaculate" in all lowercase letters,
and the "i" is dotted with a tiny, red heart. Schindler has remained
close to God and to Catholicism, going to mass every day. In his youth
he was more liberal, but today he is more conservative in his beliefs
and practices. "I still believe priests should be celibate," he says.
There are those who hope for progressive change in
the Church. The Catholic community in Eugene has, it seems, drawn
closer in the flurry of the year's exposure. The Rev. John McGrann
of St. Jude's Parish says, "Each person is the preserver of Christ
…We are all the church … [And] the people's church
requires a lot from the heart." Only with strong participation on
the grassroots level can positive change be precipitated out of the
sadness of recent events. Mary Sharon Moore, also of St. Jude's, says,
"We are meant to be healed. We are not meant to be scarred and wounded
…"
From the outside, the priesthood may appear black
and white, a world neatly defined by rules and rituals and an asceticism
that magically transforms mere men into servants of God. The upheaval
within the church this last year has proven with tragic clarity that
these men are human. And stories like Jerry Schindler's prove
with gentler clarity that they are humans who strive every day to
fulfill a commitment and vocation, amid the paradoxes of life and
religion.
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