Father Figures

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted July 1, 2002.

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 October 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 as many as 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 United States 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 -- its policy of 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 in 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, Voice of the Faithful'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."

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