Priests and Nuns: Going Their Way

. . . A priest forever, according to the order of Melchisedec.

--the Rite of Ordination

THE Vatican last week announced that all Catholic priests would henceforth be asked to make an annual public affirmation of their vows of celibacy and obedience. The day chosen for this oath was Holy Thursday--the feast day that, in Roman Catholic theology, commemorates Christ's founding of the priesthood. Obliquely, the decree was yet another negative answer from Rome to the Dutch Pastoral Council (TIME, Jan. 19), which last month advocated optional celibacy for priests. On a deeper level, the proposal was a nervous, defensive papal response to a more enduring crisis: the most notable mass defection of priests (and nuns) from the service of the church since the Reformation.

Honest Rebellion

History's most famous priestly rebel, Martin Luther, proudly uttered his defiance of church authority--"Here I stand; I can do no other"--before the Diet of Worms. With an equivalent sense of drama, some of today's priests-in-exodus have proclaimed their departures at televised press conferences or in defiant, soul-searching manifestoes. But whether their departures are public or private, the vast majority are in honest rebellion against what they feel is an authoritarian, outmoded church organization that unfairly limits their freedoms and responsibilities and frustrates their desire to serve God by serving man. Catholics are not alone in experiencing this problem. Increasingly, U.S. Protestants are losing ministers as well, often for similar reasons; as many as 3,000 Protestant clergymen are leaving U.S. pulpits every year.

"We have been born in an important age full of kaleidoscopic experiments, adventures and clashes," writes Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco, "not only between the virtues and the vices, as formerly, but rather--and this is the most tragic of all--between the virtues themselves." All too many of the priests and nuns who are turning in their collars and habits today find themselves caught between the passive virtue of obedience to an ancient, troubled structure and the active virtue of creative response to a turbulent world.

No one knows exactly how many religious have jumped over the wall--partly because it is so easy today for a priest, nun or brother simply to take a leave of absence and never return. One Vatican official estimates that 6,500 nuns (out of 1,175,000 worldwide) left last year alone. As for priests, the Vatican acknowledges that it has on file at least 10,000 requests from priests asking to be dispensed from their vows, and there are undoubtedly thousands more who have left without asking at all. In the U.S. alone, an organization called Bearings for Re-Establishment, which helps former priests, ministers and other religious find their way into the secular world, handles about 165 new priest-clients each month--2,000 per year--and this may be less than half of the total number in the U.S. who leave.

Even these disturbing figures do not adequately show the depth of the church's clerical crisis. In the past three years, the world population of Catholics has increased by 13,800,000--but there are fewer and fewer replacements for the priests and nuns who leave. Vatican statistics indicate that the number of seminarians dropped from 167,000 in 1964 to 147,000 last year. Across the U.S., hundreds of financially hard-pressed parochial schools are closing, partly because they do not have enough teaching nuns to stay open. Five years ago there was one priest for every 1,380 Catholics, worldwide; today the ratio is one for every 1,435.

Spies, Not Battalions

The Roman Catholic Church, of course, has always suffered defections from the ranks of its vow-bound servants. But in the past those who left usually went as single spies, not in battalions. The best-known rebels were usually heretics like Luther or prophets ahead of their time, like Hugues Felicite Robert de Lamennais, the 19th century activist French priest whose political liberalism prefigured modern Christian Democratic movements in Europe. Some left in shame, branded as social or spiritual misfits. Others were simply embittered by their personal experience in the church, or were unwilling to meet the stern demands of religious life. The latter reason impelled Monica Baldwin to quit the convent; she gained a measure of religious notoriety in the 1950s with her bestselling autobiographical explanation, / Leap Over the Wall. Today, in her 70s, she regrets her departure, and attributes it to "self-will and spiritual infidelity." For years, America's best-known ex-priest was former Franciscan Emmett McLoughlin (People's Padre), who left the church when his superior tried to transfer him from his work at what is now Phoenix's Memorial Hospital, where he is still administrator.

Hotly outspoken ex-priests in the McLoughlin style are the exception today. Far more leave with a deep respect and even love for Catholicism--or at least for what it might be. Keenly disturbing the church is the quality of the exodus clergy. Says Jesuit Sociologist Eugene Schallert, who has just completed a study of 317 departed priests: "Those who are leaving are some of the best men in the church--some of the most intelligent, most enterprising, most charismatic. They are occupationally top men, capable of holding down really good jobs."

Challenge to Authority

The new defectors include college presidents, provincial superiors, theologians and chancery executives. Among them is James P. Shannon (see box, page 54), onetime chairman of the board of the Association of American Colleges and one of the few U.S. bishops to earn a doctorate from a secular university. Next month the ranks of former nuns will be joined by 315 members of Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart Community, including its president and former Mother General, Sister Anita Caspary (see box, page 55). Five years ago, the nation's most publicized advocates of convent renewal were Sister Jacqueline Grennan of Missouri's Webster College and Sister Charles Borromeo Muckinhern of St. Mary's College, Notre Dame. Both have since left the religious life. Sister Jacqueline is now Mrs. Paul Wexler and the new president of Manhattan's Hunter College.

French Theologian Jean Cardinal Danielou, writing in L'Osservatore Romano recently, argued that the attacks on celibacy were really a challenge to papal authority. To a certain extent, James Shannon would agree. At issue in the clerical exodus, he argues, is the nature of church government and the way in which its teachings are formulated. For centuries, Catholicism was a consistent defender of the principles of Roman law, which envisions government from the top by code and decree, with moral and theological teachings established by deductive reasoning from a priori principles.

At the Second Vatican Council, the church began to turn away from Roinanita; it envisioned a more democratized church in which power would be shared, and suggested that doctrine and morality should reflect not the deductions of casuists but the faith and reflective experience of God's people. Many of the exodus clergy in North America and Europe have also been affected by non-Roman ideologies: the Anglo-Saxon common law, in which community consensus shapes law, and the scientific method, which arrives at truth through empirical reasoning based on observed evidence. All this contributes to a rebellion against a church hierarchy still trapped by its traditional concept of how power should be used. "Ours is a legal struggle with authority," says Sister Anita of the Immaculate

Heart nuns. "Where we see the embodiment of authority and where the Sacred Congregation of Religion sees it."

Ironically, the clerical exodus was occasioned by the Second Vatican Council --the most significant movement of Catholic renewal in centuries. Initially, Vatican II was heralded as the first council in history that did not lead to a schism. Many observers now fear the danger of what they call a "psychological schism," in which progressive Catholics will nominally remain in the church, but increasingly work out their own definitions of Christian life.

The greatest danger of such a psychological schism is in The Netherlands.

Before World War II and perhaps even before the council, Dutch Catholics were noted for their pious conservatism. The war forced many of the church's leaders into working for a common cause with previously distrusted Protestants and into dialogue with atheists. The Dutch interpreted the new direction of Vatican II with their customary thoroughness. "We are used to taking everything very seriously in Holland," says Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink, 69, the imperturbable biblical scholar who heads his nation's hierarchy. "It is not in our character to be very subtle. The Dutch are pretty stringent and rigid."

In the years since the council, Dutch theologians have been among the church's leaders in proposing novel formulations of dogma. Abetted by their priests, Dutch lay Catholics vociferously opposed Pope Paul's 1968 ban on contraception, which they have largely ignored. Last month a nationwide Pastoral Council passed a resolution urging, optional celibacy for priests.

Eminent Names

In a flurry of public addresses and letters, Pope Paul has clearly indicated that he cannot accept the Dutch demand, although he is willing to discuss the possibility of ordaining a few elderly married laymen to the priesthood where pastoral necessity demands it. Alfrink and the bishops are encouraged by what a Dutch theologian calls an "opening in an eternal wall of 'No.' " It remains to be seen whether the papal concession will satisfy the progressives who dominate the Dutch church's lay and clerical ranks. But Alfrink remains hopeful that the hierarchy can avoid a split. "We all mean well, both here in Holland and in Rome," he says. "Somehow we are drifting apart, being ripped apart, even. But finally we shall resolve this."

In the U.S., as in The Netherlands, faith has not prevented many a believing priest and nun from joining the exodus. On the rolls of those leaving today are some of U.S. Catholicism's most eminent names--such as former Jesuit Bernard J. Cooke, one of the nation's leading Catholic theologians. Last November, Cooke announced that he was leaving the clerical state and Marquette University, where he was chairman of the theology department, because he saw "a need to develop new forms of Christian life and priestly ministry outside the ordinary clerical structures but not in opposition to them."

Now doing research on Christian ministry and priesthood at Yale, Cooke believes that some religious are leaving, as others have in the past, because they discover that "this way of life does not fit them as persons." But many others are seeking new modes of Christian life outside institutional structures because "the possibility of creating such new forms seems temporarily denied by the power structure within the Roman Catholic Church, most critically by Rome itself." For others who leave, particularly in recent years, "their decision results from a combination of frustration and disappointment."

Years of Waiting

John Cardinal Wright, the American prefect for the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, believes that frustration is the key word. Frustration, Wright explains, affects many kinds of religious: the lonely missionary who is deprived of the "sufficient means" for his job, lacking books for his school or medicines for his hospital; the alert young curate who fears his views are not being heard or heeded by a national hierarchy top-heavy with age.

Many young priests are simply crushed by years of unproductive waiting. Ordained in their 20s, they often have to wait decades for the kind of responsibility that can come to laymen in a matter of years. Others recoil from the fawning attitudes of lay Catholics, who treat them like embryonic saints. Asks Los Angeles Psychologist Carlo Weber, a former Jesuit: "Do you know how it feels to be spoken to in a set way: 'Yes, Father . . . good Father--so nice to have you here, Father'? Rotten, that's how. Nothing could be more deleterious to a personality."

Studies of the exodus indicate that celibacy alone is not a major cause of priests' leaving the ministry. Sociologist

Eugene Schallert reports that many priests think they leave to marry but actually leave for other reasons. His survey of ex-priests shows that nearly all of them zealously embraced the concepts of reform introduced by Vatican II. "The person opts for questioning instead of the ready answer, for 'this worldly' rather than 'other worldly' orientation, for personalism over absolutism. He is inclined toward change, but he believes no change is occurring. He finds he does not believe very deeply in the rules of the church." With that, says Schallert, he begins to ask, "Who am I?" He seeks help from someone, whom Schallert calls the "crucial other"--a friend, a superior, a confessor. He does not find it, and finally he decides to leave. "Once that decision is made," says Schallert, "he may develop a close relationship with a woman. When we start talking with him, the thing on his mind is the woman. Then we start probing to find out when this all started, and it wasn't a woman at all."

Schallert notes that priests spend "an average of four to five years agonizing over their decision before walking out of the door. They probably spend more time deciding to leave than they spend deciding to enter the ministry. They just don't get mad at somebody and walk out in a huff. The priest who leaves may be frustrated at the difficulty in finding a way to work for the church, but he is not angry."

Death Wish

The experiences of former priests interviewed by TIME bear Schallert out. PAUL HILSDALE, 47, is a sociologist and former Jesuit who now conducts "awareness workshops" with his anthropologist wife in Los Angeles. "I left the priest hood," he recalls, "because I wanted to grow into a person who was ever more responsible and ever more loving. The church and the Jesuit structures were narrowing areas in which I could express my love." He resented the fact that when he said Mass, "people thought I was doing some kind of magic." After taking a leave from Loyola University of Los Angeles to spend a year at Esalen, Hilsdale says, "I found my value. At least I knew that if I was a sinner, I was a valuable sinner." Hilsdale goes to Mass occasionally, but feels that "Christianity is just one of many symbol systems that point to man's dependence on God." As for Catholicism, he adds: "There are times when I think the church may have a death wish." FRANK MATTHEWS, 47, formerly a St. Louis priest heading archdiocesan radio and TV projects, serves as director of recruitment for VISTA. "I had reached the threshold of frustration," he says of his own departure in 1967. "I couldn't accept the church's position on birth control and celibacy, or its slow implementation of consensus theology. I was disturbed by the lack of ability on the part of the church to criticize itself. I am sure that my wife Ellen [his former secretary] had a lot to do with it. In one way, I can say that I simply fell in love, but she was also the catalyst that made me see my other problems in perspective." Matthews believes that "success in a job is very important to any man, but to a man leaving the priesthood it's crucial." He feels that some men should "never leave the priesthood because they need the structure." As for himself, he explains with candor: "I often wonder why I have no regrets about the priesthood, especially since I was a happy priest. In fact, I only regret that I didn't have this experience --that I didn't move on years earlier." HERMAN HUDEPOHL, 35, spent two years as a Maryknoll missionary in Peru. He is now an insurance and mutual-fund salesman. "Believe it or not," he says, "I think I can do as much for people in this type of work as I was doing in the priesthood. In Peru, we were running around blessing houses that had been struck by lightning and making sick calls. We had fiesta Masses coming out of our ears. My God, what they needed was doctors, medicine, technical help. We weren't helping. We were giving them a piece of bread." Hudepohl thinks that the sheer numbers of religious in exodus may change Catholicism; his wife Nancy, who was a Dominican nun for ten years, is more pessimistic: "The church has nothing to say to people."

Case Investigator Maurice Geary, formerly of St. David's Church in Detroit, is "happy as hell that I'm on the outside." A civil rights militant, he left the priesthood after the archdiocese tried to demote him from his parish assignment to a lesser job. Unlike many former clerics who still regard themselves as priests but inactive ones, Geary has abandoned any sense of the ministry. "I wasn't looking to start my own church," he says. "Why should I light a candle and play games by celebrating the Mass in the basement?"

Gray Zone

Some former priests retain strong feelings for their clerical past. Former Jesuit Eugene C. Bianchi is now married and teaching theology at Emory University in Atlanta. He is also President of the Society of Priests for a Free Ministry, which claims some 1,000 priests (some married, some not) exercising a sort of freewheeling ministry around the U.S. Writing in John A. O'Brien's recent book, Why Priests Leave, Bianchi argues that "some of us will have to move into a gray zone" the better to try new styles of priesthood, but looks gratefully on his Jesuit past "as a preparation for a new mission." Occasionally, the pull of the past can draw a priest back to the official ministry. Bearings for Re-Establishment found that one priest-client was disgruntled principally because his bishop had refused his many requests for transfer from a lonely country parish; Bearings found him a new bishop and sent him happily back to work. Many more, however, would agree with Thomas J. Durkin, a former Philadelphia priest now directing Bianchi's group from San Francisco. Even if the celibacy rule is lifted, says Durkin, going back to parish life "would put me in a situation that a lot of Protestant ministers are leaving."

In the first years that followed Vatican II, priests who abandoned their vocation often had a hard time. Shunned by former colleagues and sometimes even their families, they found employ ers suspicious of their past and their training inadequate for secular life. Sociologist Schallert learned that many had particular difficulty in adjusting to mature relationships with women: "Girls sometimes tell them, 'You act like a 14-year-old boy.' " Even wearing a necktie could be a trauma.

All that is changing. Pope Paul has made it much easier for dissatisfied priests to gain dispensations from their vows; counseling services like Bearings, Washington's Career Programming Institute, and San Francisco's Next Step provide advice about jobs, psychological help (if needed) and often sedately swinging parties for ex-priests to meet other men and women who have jumped over the wall. Career Programming has placed former clerics in jobs paying as much as $35,000 a year. Even though some priests may have mainly theological backgrounds, explains a Bearings counselor, businesses are increasingly interested in them because liberal-arts graduates are "trained in clear thinking."

Even some members of the hierarchy have come to accept the departure of their trusted servants with something resembling equanimity. Last month, when Msgr. James M. Murray left the priesthood after 28 years in order to marry, he explained to relatives that he "had entered the church by the front door and was leaving by the front door." Thereupon he mounted the pulpit of St. John the Evangelist Church in San Francisco at noon Mass one Sunday and told his congregation all about his decision. Archbishop Joseph McGucken even made a farewell statement of appreciation for his services to the church.

Catholic colleges are now willing to hire ex-priests from elsewhere to teach; some exodus clerics are apparently allowed to remain on their own campuses. Fordham's prominent Jesuit Philosopher Robert O. Johann, who has requested laicization* because of a "growing disaffection with the way in which power and authority are exercised in the official church," is on a year's leave of absence at Holy Cross College; he has been officially welcomed back to Fordham for the school's fall semester. Catholic University Theologian Daniel C. Maguire, who helped draft the critique of Humanae Vitae signed by some 600 U.S. Catholic academics, resigned his ministry last November to marry. He is still an associate professor of religion and ethics at the university and plans to remain so.

The exodus crisis has traditionally been somewhat easier for nuns than for priests. Even sisters bound by solemn vows of chastity "until death" have been able to get dispensations with relative ease. And for a girl trained as a teacher or nurse, the transition to secular status was relatively painless. Leaving today "is a simple matter," says Midge Turk, college editor of Glamour magazine and an Immaculate Heart sister until 1966. ''A nun writes to the Pope. says please-give-me-a-dispensation-because-I-can-no-longer-function-in-this- life, and she almost automatically gets a prompt notification of release from her vows." But there is the fashion syndrome. One former nun recalls the shock of recognition when she first replaced her habit with a mod dress "and discovered my legs hanging out down there."

Even more than priests, nuns leaving church service these days rarely do so with a sense of failure. Says Leonora Kountz, a former Sister of Loretto who is now teaching in Chicago: "My order is one of the most progressive in the U.S. I certainly had no quarrel with them. Quitting was a sort of shifting the weight of my life. One's life has a certain weight, or direction, at one time, but it dawned on me that the weight had shifted toward another direction."

Time to Unwind

Mrs. Carole Tegeler is a Chicago housewife who was a Franciscan nun for 14 years; with her husband, she runs a halfway house for ex-priests and nuns. She takes a similarly open approach to leaving religious life. "When people tell us they are about to leave, we always ask them not what they are departing from, but what they are leaving for." The former Sister Corita Kent, who taught in the art department of Immaculate Heart College, felt that she needed time to unwind. "I have put a lot of shows on the road," says Corita, who lives and works in Boston. "Now I have a quiet job to do with myself. Young people carry forward a great deal of visible energetic action. When that's done, you have something else to do."

Perhaps even more than priests, nuns often retain a warm affection for the communal life of religion they have left. Corita says of her former community: "So many super people gathered under one roof. It was a rich experience." In 1967, the mother superior of the Glenmary Sisters of Cincinnati led 44 of her nuns out of the small, rural-oriented order. The situation was a prototype of the Immaculate Heart dispute: a progressive faced the opposition of an archbishop (Karl Alter of Cincinnati, now retired) who felt that things were moving too fast. The Glenmarys' mother superior, now Miss Catherine Rumschlag, proposed that the liberal majority of sisters go secular. Today the group functions as a service organization called FOCUS, and does teaching and social work in three regional centers throughout Appalachia.

The 315 Immaculate Heart nuns who are leaving the order next month will continue to run Immaculate Heart College, the high school and the infirmary. The difference, say the nuns, is that they will "be free to follow what Vatican II asked us to do in the first place." As for the old, orderly convent regime of prescribed prayers, meals and periods of silence, Sister Ancilla O'Neill, 77, says: "All those rules kept us from thinking. You never had to make a decision because all the decisions were made for you." Now the sisters have more responsibilities, but more distractions as well: wardrobes, hair care, cars --and with lay status, taxes.

What will be the outcome of today's clerical exodus? Where and when will it end? Neither the exiting priests and nuns nor those who remain strongly faithful to their vows have an easy answer. Maryknoll Psychologist Eugene Kennedy of Chicago predicts that in the next decade "the most creative and healthiest will continue to depart in mounting numbers, leaving their conservative colleagues with the balance of power" in the church. He predicts that this will be "an illusory victory for the traditionalists" since they will not be able to recruit the kind of successors they want. "At this stage, which will be reached before 1975 in many places, a basic reworking of the religious life will finally be seen as necessary to the mission of the church."

Signs of Vitality

What gives a measure of credibility to this prospect of change is evidence that the new generation of religious recruits seems to be as dedicated to renewal as those who have left ecclesiastical ranks in the cause of another form of Christian service. Says a Jesuit scholastic from California, Lawrence Goulet: "Is there hope for the future of the church? Does the bear live in the woods? Some see tumult in the church as destructive decadence. I see it as a sign of vitality." Seminarian Lyndon Farwell contends that "those of us who are staying with the institutional church do so not looking backward to what has been, but forward to what can be.

The church is being transformed and will continue to be transformed. We want to be part of that transformation."

Many future priests have more in common with today's ex-priests than they do with those who administer the institutional church.

That is not to argue that tomorrow's vision is necessarily better than yesterday's, or that the Christian rebels are certain to be more accurate prophets than the Christian traditionalists. In an era of stress and uncertainty, those who stand and serve in obedience to the Holy See may ultimately demonstrate more wisdom than those who are challenging it. Despite the clamor for change on celibacy, there is no guarantee that marriage will become an option for priests of the future. Despite the promise of the Immaculate Heart experiment, there is no guarantee that it will be the model for future Christian communities. The modern ecclesiastical rebel seems to want instant change--and indeed, change is necessary and inevitable. The historical way of the Catholic Church, however, is to reform only after the dust of disruption and internal struggle has settled.

The priests and nuns who have joined the exodus have, in a certain sense, lost some personal battles. It remains to be seen whether they will have won a communal war. If--and it is a very large if --the church in the next decades emerges as a new vivid epiphany of the Christian experience, more truly catholic but less Roman, then those who have departed its service will be entitled to a large share of the credit.

*A canonical process in which a petitioner is first examined on his reasons for leaving, then ultimately "reduced to the lay status." The procedure can often be humiliating, and many priests (including James Shannon) simply refuse to undergo it.

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