My husband, the priest: can the church afford to ignore these men?

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Amy Welborn

In a way, ours is like any other marriage, a union of souls, raising children, paying the bills. In a way, too, it is like any other second marriage embarked on by two people in their early middle age. Both accustomed to being in charge, running our own and the lives of those in our care, unaccustomed, at first, to making joint decisions, to even asking the other what he or she thinks about it.

As is the case with any second marriage, both with histories we bring, histories living and dead, histories brought out and laid on the table and worked over and through, histories left alone because they are too painful or because there really is no point.

My history runs around the house or calls on the phone--three children ages twenty to eleven, plus an ex-husband. That marriage has been over and annulled for ten years, but the evidence still sits at the dinner table and checks come twice a month.

So yes, it's like any other marriage, any other second marriage, any other marriage between two forty-somethings who find themselves in the ridiculous position of chasing after a nineteen-month-old, who is our own history in the making.

But there's something different, too. I told you about my history. Then there's his. He's a Catholic priest. Yes, out for several years, formally laicized--"reduced"--as official church lingo puts it--to the "lay state."

Reduced, perhaps, but not (as the popular terminology puts it) really an "ex-priest" or even a "former priest," because, of course, as the old ordination rite put it, Tu es sacerdos in aeternam. You are a priest for eternity. That's a long time to keep a history.

It lives with us in various ways, some concrete, like more children from another marriage, only quieter. When he left the church, he gave away all his vestments to a Brazilian seminarian, but he's still got his first chalice and paten stored in a box in the back of a closet. He's got his sick-call set, too, with little containers of oil, a purple stole, and an empty pyx. Just in case?

The history goes beyond the physical relics, though. Leaving the priesthood is, of course, difficult on every level. Unless you've obtained another professional degree in the process, you're stuck with one of the most useless credentials known to humanity, even if you have three of them, as he does: degrees in religion. I should know--I have one too.

That means, of course, that your most logical future employer is your past employer: the church. But you really can't work for the church in the diocese in which you were a priest, especially if it is a small diocese where everyone knows you, so you really have to move, and you probably want to, too. It's all well and good to be open and honest and hope that the people who "knew you when" will accept you as they know you now, but it strikes me as more than a bit insensitive, even arrogant. Announcing your departure from the pulpit one weekend and sitting in the pew with your female friend the next--and yes, I've known someone who's done it--strikes me as just a bit self-serving.

Even if you move, remember that canon law prohibits some professions (and all roles during Mass--like lector) to you, although bishops vary in their attention to that rule, so if you want--or have--to work in the church, you have to look hard for a bishop who will look at those rules for what they are. Which is nonsense.

You have to make other transitions, too. You have to go from a life in which old ladies called you "Father" and treated you like the good son they thought they never had, to one in which you are just one employee among many. You go from standing (however unwillingly) on a pedestal to being either necessarily anonymous or actually reviled as some sort of traitor, especially by your former colleagues in the priesthood, some of whom will support you, while others of whom will never write or call again. It's just the way it is. So much for the brotherhood.

Yes, priests work hard, but priests are also given a great deal as well. They benefit from scads of professional privilege, from dry cleaners to dentists. Doctors write prescriptions for them in the sacristy after Mass. They are showered with gifts--mostly booze or checks--at Christmas. Most of them have housekeepers, cooks, and car allowances. They have the promise of being taken care of the rest of their lives.

So the priest who leaves, leaves all of that and faces, perhaps for the first time, or at least the first time in a long time, the pressures of real, practical responsibility with consequences, not only for himself, but for others as well.

It makes for an interesting marriage.

It also makes for interesting interactions with our fellow Catholics, of all stripes and varieties.

You see, despite the quick judgments of many who hear who he is and who we are, my husband and I are not exactly radical Catholics. We're actually in a rather odd spot theologically. I guess you could call us "orthodox." Mostly. We're both well schooled in modern interpreters of faith, and have found them wanting, to say the least. You can tell by what books are allowed to live upstairs and which are relegated to the basement. The literary progeny of past presidents of the Catholic Theological Society of America and European priests in snappy suits are used to living in the dark.