Married, With Children--and a Priest--Peter Manseau on Roman Catholic religious who marry

We're sorry, but this content is no longer available on Beliefnet. You may enjoy the following related articles: Afterlife: An Ex-Priest's Story By Luke Timothy Johnson When the Priesthood Isn't Forever By Ralph McInerny Don't Treat Married Priests Like Pariahs By John Horan The Priest Shortage and the Simple Solution By Deborah Caldwell Does Celibacy Work for the Catholic Church? By Eugene Cullen Kennedy Hocus pocus --a bit of fake Latin, I would later learn, a medieval parody of Hoc est corpus meum , the ritual words of transubstantiation, the spell for which my parents' friends now waited. Magic above the table, magic below. * "This is my body," I would hear Dad say. "This is my blood." * The Married Priest People were a ragtag community, full of men and women who had been through the ecclesiastical wringer. Some priests who left their service in the church found other work right away. Using the diverse skill set they'd acquired in their parishes, they became teachers and professors, social workers and businessmen, or, as my father eventually did, psychologists, lending their priestly ears to the clinical confessions of therapy and analysis. The men who made such transitions without difficulty were the minority, though. After a decade or more spent sheltered in the church, most, my father included, had a hard time readjusting to the world. Their families, like ours, seemed kept afloat by strong-willed women, who often found themselves supporting their households while their husbands struggled to find their secular sea legs. It was, it seems to me now, a community that included an inordinate number of damaged people; damaged by the church, damaged by leaving it, damaged by loving it still. * Their devotion to the Catholic Church, and to the changing of it, informed every part of their lives. The result was the strangeness of Catholic ritual transposed onto the ordinariness of our suburban household; symbolic actions that felt like theater in an auditorium-sized church around our dining room table had an intimacy and immediacy that moved me before I was old enough to wonder why. * All well and good as far as my mother was concerned, but no matter how moving or genuinely supportive such at-home liturgies were to these men who wore exile as their cross, Mass in the dining room was not, could never be, church as she understood the word. * This is the hold of the Catholic worldview that my mother developed in the parishes and convents of Irish Boston: even as she married a priest, even as she accepted and agreed with him that he should remain a priest despite the protestations of his superiors, it seems my mother could not but view priests who married as damaged goods where performance of the liturgy was concerned. She'd left the Sisters of St. Joseph with none of the looking back that plagued my father, but there was something of the nun in her. She needed music and vestments, candles and incense, stained-glass windows and the tinkling of bells in order to feel that she had worshipped properly. Nevertheless, for all her ambivalence, my mother would still join the others in the torn bits of pita bread that passed for the Eucharist those weekend evenings. Why shouldn't she? Chances are she had already attended an actual Mass earlier that day, so her ritual bases were covered. * My father meanwhile insisted that "'church" was not a place but an occasion, a holy occurrence--something that happened, as the Gospel says, "whenever two or more gather" in Jesus' name. As for communion, it was just what it sounded like, a coming together with God. It was the church's insistence that centralized authority was necessary for sacramental experience that led to the great abuses of its power. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don't get Dad started. Imagine this discussion casually asserting itself at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. My mother looks down at her mug of tea, lifts the teabag and lets it drip back into the cup. "Yes, dear," she'd say, "I'm sure it's still a real sacrament when you do it." And then she would bundle us up and out the door to church. Removed Text Ends Here-->