Word: priestly
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Gerassi will speak at 8 p.m. tonight in Lowell Lecture Hall, along with Blase Bonpane, the Maryknoll priest who was deported from Guatemala for aiding the guerrillas there...
Judas Complex. As their numbers grow, former priests are approaching a new life in the secular world with an increasing confidence. In the past, priests who abandoned their vocations felt so disgraced that often they suffered for months and even years from a "Judas" complex-the feeling of having betrayed Christ. Things are more civilized now. Patrick Best, a Detroit priest who left last May and has gone back to school, boasts that "my congregation even gave me a couple of going-away parties." George Frein, a St. Louis priest who married an ex-nun in June, has been hired...
...initial problem facing a former priest is finding a job. For some, this task is still a very difficult one. Stripped of the comforting shelter of parish life, the secularized cleric is transferred, in the words of one ex-priest, from "total security to total insecurity." Many have no means of support. Others have too willingly settled for the first menial job that comes along. Their training, often exclusively in theology, is not exactly a marketable commodity...
...Priests who leave the ministry to marry generally must contend with hostility from two major sources: their parents and the Catholic hierarchy. "Many in my family were ready to consider my wife just a beautiful siren who had tempted me away," explains Frank Ostrowski, 38, who left his Minnesota teaching post after eleven years as a priest. "But I finally got my parents to accept what to them was almost like death-that their dear, darling son was no longer a priest...
...ecclesiastical structure is not so easily swayed. If a priest wants to leave the ministry and marry, he must send a letter to his bishop or the head of his religious order asking for laicization. Even if he is released from ministerial duties, a priest must also apply to the Vatican for a dispensation from his vow of celibacy. Some prelates simply ignore these requests, and Rome has been equally reluctant about dispensing men from vows. As a result, most for mer priests have married without permission, thereby incurring automatic excommunication. Few feel any guilt about doing so. "The church...