Word: exoduses
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History's most famous priestly rebel, Martin Luther, proudly uttered his defiance of church authority?"Here I stand; I can do no other"?before the Diet of Worms. With an equivalent sense of drama, some of today's priests-in-exodus have proclaimed their departures at televised press conferences or in defiant, soul-searching manifestoes. But whether their departures are public or private, the vast majority are in honest rebellion against what they feel is an authoritarian, outmoded church organization that unfairly limits their freedoms and responsibilities and frustrates their desire to serve God by serving man. Catholics...
...priests and nuns who have joined the exodus have, in a certain sense, lost some personal battles. It remains to be seen whether they will have won a communal war. If?and it is a very large if ?the church in the next decades emerges as a new vivid epiphany of the Christian experience, more truly catholic but less Roman, then those who have departed its service will be entitled to a large share of the credit...
Hotly outspoken ex-priests in the McLoughlin style are the exception today. Far more leave with a deep respect and even love for Catholicism?or at least for what it might be. Keenly disturbing the church is the quality of the exodus clergy. Says Jesuit Sociologist Eugene Schallert, who has just completed a study of 317 departed priests: "Those who are leaving are some of the best men in the church?some of the most intelligent, most enterprising, most charismatic. They are occupationally top men, capable of holding down really good jobs...
...Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Roman Catholic hierarchy. For nearly three years, the nuns had demanded freedom from the traditional rules of the cloister; the Vatican and the archdiocese of Los Angeles insisted on fealty to religious discipline. Last week the dispute ended with the largest exodus from Roman Catholic religious life in recent memory...
...shortly afterward saw evacuees from a Biafran hospital hobbling down a road with intravenous needles still stuck in their arms and glucose bottles held aloft so the fluid could drip down. "The roads were choked with people," another priest recalled. "I could see terror in their faces." The exodus reminded him of an Ibo proverb: "A man who is running for his life never gets tired." But some did; they sat down along the road and never rose. Then the vultures swooped in, swiftly and silently...