Word: priestly
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Fortunately for these ex-priests, a number of volunteer agencies have sprung up to help them make the adjustment to civilian life. Best known of these is Bearings for Re-Establishment, with headquarters in New York City and branches in five other cities. Founded last year by William Restivo, 36, a former priest-missionary in Kenya, Bearings is financed by contributions from sympathetic Catholic laymen, each week helps an average of half a dozen former priests find lodgings and jobs...
Thanks to the helpful work of such groups as Bearings, an increasing number of "F.P.s" (as former priests are now called) are finding reasonably rewarding new occupations. Many go into teaching-though if the Catholic seminaries that they attended are unaccredited, which is often the case, they must return to college to earn a teacher's certificate. Others enter social work. One ex-priest, only four weeks 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...
Punch or Judy. Yet when an ex-priest lands a good job, he is apt to discover that the secular afterlife is no paradise. One former cleric in Los Angeles, now employed as a social worker, finds that his $700-a-month salary, which he at first considered lavish, barely sustains him. About two-thirds get married-taking on the added burdens of providing for a family. And though Catholics no longer automatically conclude that a priest who has left the church did so because of "Punch or Judy" trouble-drink or women-many are still suspicious. Parents are especially...
...most part, though, Catholics have become accustomed to the fact of ex-priests in their midst; many of the defectors remain on good terms with friends still in clerical ranks. Nonetheless, former priests generally prefer anonymity and seek to avoid publicizing their ecclesiastical background. Says one former priest from the Midwest, who now is a Boston textbook salesman: "On the whole I have met with very little hostility-but then I don't tell everyone I meet, 'Guess what? I used to be a priest...
Died. Charles Bickford, 78, veteran actor; of emphysema; in Los Angeles. A ruddy-faced onetime lumberjack, Bickford most often merely played himself-a rough, tough, but good and decent man, remembered as the priest in The Song of Bernadette (1944), and recently as the leathery ranch owner in TV's The Virginian...