Word: priestly
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Thank you for your article on the American Catholic Church [May 24]. It is nice to know that I am not alone in my spiritual dilemma. I am unable to accept a church that has become so concerned about questions of language and the direction the priest should face that it cannot rationally address itself to such problems as birth control and abortion...
...church was openly and honestly authoritarian. If some regulation was difficult, one knew that everyone was struggling with the same difficulty. Now we have the authoritarianism of the personal whim of some bishop or parish priest, and people are just as truly "stuck with it" as they would have been years ago with a decree from the Pope...
Barrett, who hopes to become an Episcopal priest, believes that St. Paul's condemnation of "dishonorable passions," referred to homosexual acts rather than to a whole way of life. She says, "Paul wouldn't understand that a person could grow up gay." Neither, it seems, can most U.S. Protestants, who seem unlikely to accept homosexual leadership in their churches soon...
What may come sooner than the ordination of women is the option for priests to marry-or at least for some married men to become priests. But Pope Paul has no intention of easing the rule of clerical celibacy, and some lay Catholics have misgivings too. Says Nurse Slevin: "I cannot see how one could have children and be a full-time priest. He would have to spend more time on his children's development and less on parish problems." But Margaret Howells, of Fairfax, Va., finds that her experience of going through a marital separation "makes me call...
Monsignor William Stapleton, pastor of St. Columbkille's, believes the wholesale defections of priests were a signal from on high: "I think it's God's way of saying 'Hey, the priests are not the only ones in my church, and I can make use of the laity as well.' Lay people are the church as much as I am." Indeed, laymen-and women-are increasingly distributing the Communion bread, an innovation that is not always popular. Says Robert Drummond, 47, a lay minister of Communion at St. Ambrose's parish in Dorchester, Mass...