Religious Journeys in the Rochester Diocese

"Getting married?" asks a webpage hosted by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester. "The Church welcomes you and is delighted you are considering celebrating this time in your life in the presence of God.... Call your parish to begin the process."

This applies only to the laity, however. Roman Catholic priests and nuns who plan to marry or pursue love relationships are called to say goodbye.

But sometimes there’s a reversal. Nuns and priests leave their vocations to stay in touch with their faith. The forbidden marriage leads to an engagement --- with the world, with a new spiritual critique, even with the Church.

Consider the life of one local ex-priest.

Jack Neary, a Greece resident, began his adulthood on a path frequently taken by local Catholic men: He graduated from Aquinas Institute in 1950, then went off to St. Michael’s College, a Roman Catholic component of the University of Toronto. In 1961, he was ordained at St. Basil’s, a seminary across from "St. Mike’s." He also studied math at University College, a secular unit of U of T. The Toronto atmosphere was different from what most seminarians experience: "We weren’t quite as isolated," he says.

The non-isolation led Neary far and wide. For a while, he was a schoolteacher in Toronto. Then in 1971, he left the priesthood to marry and moved south. He was a teacher and counselor in Lawton, Oklahoma, and later in Houston, Texas. His wife, Jean Neary, taught music at all levels, including college.

The couple retired a few years ago and moved back to the Rochester area. Jack also was active in Catholic parishes along the way. He recalls working in a 1960s "Model Cities" social welfare program in Oklahoma.

"I think married priests would add a lot to the Church," Neary says. "Marriage," he says, "is something that’s very natural and good." The institution of marriage connects with two strands of reality, he says: "the God of Creation that’s responsible for everything that is, and the redemptive order."

Following this line of thought, Neary says in effect that celibacy is an unnatural construct. It wasn’t imposed until the year 1139, he says. "It was really because of property, property that was left to [priests’] offspring." In other words, the Church sought to increase its holdings by being sole heir.

Neary is a student of Church history, but he doesn’t fixate on the past. He says he’s a member of the national advocacy groups CORPUS and CITI. (See main article for more information.) "I don’t think they’ve made much of a dent," he says, adding that the groups do offer much support for individuals. "Rome has a way of cutting people off," he says.

But Neary doesn’t mean only those who challenge the rule of celibacy. The Pope and his circle, he says, have cut off respected dissenting theologians like Rochester native Charles Curran and the Europeans Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx. Thinkers like these, says Neary, embody the reformist spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

But it’s the thought of Creation Spirituality, as expressed by liberation theologian Matthew Fox, which most interests Neary. Fox --- who became an Episcopal priest after being thrown out of the Dominican order --- is founder and president of the Oakland-based University of Creation Spirituality. Describing his own life as "the making of a post-denominational priest," Fox echoes Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen.

Fox, says Neary, "is much less into structures and authority" than is the institutional Church of today. And creation spirituality, says Neary, recognizes "that the Church does not see sexuality as God created it."

Neary is a member of Spiritus Christi congregation, which separated from Corpus Christi parish and the mainline Church following official pressure to abstain from giving women a leadership role and blessing same-sex unions. Yet there’s a drama of separation going on at Spiritus today.