Word: clerics
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...past 18 months, an estimated 400 priests have left the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. For most of them, the transition to secular life is a traumatic experience. Unless a cleric enjoys private means, he is usually broke; unless he has close relatives, he has no place to stay...
...after quitting, got a job at Funk & Wagnalls Publishing Co. in Manhattan. "I was completely honest on my job application," he says. "I just put down that I was a laicized priest, and that sent them to their dictionary." Still others end up in less likely pursuits. A California cleric has become a chiropractor. One Biblical scholar now works for a company that makes rocket components...
Inside many a modern Roman Catholic priest nowadays seethes a latter-day Luther crying to be born. One troubled cleric who has let the rebel inside him speak out is the Rev. James Kavanaugh, 37, a diocesan priest of Lansing, Mich., now serving as a counselor to a private mental health foundation in California. In a new book entitled A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (Trident; $4.95), Kavanaugh unleashes a bitter, searing attack on the foibles and faults of Roman Catholicism, which he still professes to love and serve. Thanks in large measure to its shock value...
...still other critics, the objection to draft exemption goes deeper than the war and involves the broader question of the clergy's relation to secular society. In their view, exemption from service, like the old "clergyman's discount" at stores, unfairly and unnecessarily sets the cleric apart as a privileged member of society. Some seminarians even feel that their exemption stigmatizes them in the eyes of others as suspected draft dodgers. Still another argument against exemption is that clergymen, if faced with the real challenge of whether or not to serve, would be forced to evaluate more searchingly...
Sheer Monkery. Much to his parents' dismay, Luther kept the vow, two weeks later entered the Augustinian priory at Erfurt. Luther was a pious cleric. "I kept the rule so strictly," he recalled years later, "that I may say that if ever a monk got to Heaven by his sheer monkery it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work...