Word: hegger
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...Wartburg will provide former priests with free food, clothing, lodging, and a quiet room for study. After six or eight weeks, Hegger will arrange for his clients to live with sympathetic Dutch families. Hegger believes that his own experience should help him guide others through their spiritual crisis, and as a Calvinist he hopes to convince them that his own church represents the answer to their spiritual needs. Only two kinds of ex-priests are barred from the Wartburg: converts to Communism, and clerics who are wanted by the police on criminal charges...
Doubts About Dogma. A seminary student from the age of twelve, Hegger was ordained as a priest in 1936. Even as a novice, he had doubts about Catholicism's Marian dogmas and about papal infallibility; as a priest, he also came to question the validity of the Mass and confession. Sent to Brazil to teach philosophy, Hegger learned the tenets of Protestantism from a Methodist pastor in Rio ; in July 1948 he formally left the church...
Returning to The Netherlands, Hegger studied at the Calvinist Free University in Amsterdam, incorporated a foundation for ex-priests called "On Straight Street. '' * began publishing a monthly magazine that now claims a circulation of 13,000. He married a woman he met a year after quitting the church, and began using their home as a temporary haven for ex-clergy...
...Defection. Hegger argues that there is a real need for his un usual kind of ministry. Last year the Archdiocese of Utrecht admitted that 180 Dutch priests were living outside the church. Hegger says that in Italy and France 6,700 priests have fallen away from Catholicism since World...
...Hegger thinks that former Trappists, who observe almost total silence, find it hardest to adjust to their new status as laymen. But all, as outlaws from their church, face a difficult future. They know-little else but how to preach or say Mass, must learn to live with the emotional hostility many Christians feel toward someone who has forsaken a sacred calling. "They need help.'' Hegger says. "They are so much alone...