Why do priests leave the priesthood

Technically, if he were to perform a sacrament in accord with the norms of the Church, that sacrament would indeed be valid. However, the sacrament would be illicit , meaning he violated Church law and would be culpable for this infraction since he no longer has the faculties to function as a priest. Here the Church is recognizing the indelible spiritual character received by the priest— although now laicized— at his ordination. For instance, suppose a person was hurt in a car accident and was dying.

Moreover, even if this priest had left the priesthood without proper permission and was in a state of mortal sin, he could still validly absolve the dying person of sin. Keep in mind too that if a laicized priest decides to return to the active ministry, he would not be re-ordained.

Instead, he would have to have permission from the Holy Father and complete whatever other requirements the bishop or other Church authority would impose. See Code of Canon Law , Please note that even if a priest leaves the active ministry without proper permission and without ever being laicized, he too still has the sacramental character of Holy Orders.

But Catholic priests aren't allowed to do either, so he chose to leave the church instead. Mike sat down with his son, David, in the StoryCorps booth when it was in Columbus this past summer. They spoke about Mike's journey leaving the priesthood, finding his wife Norma and continuing to practice his faith. Mike decided to leave the priesthood even before he found love—unlike some other ex-priests, who face the decision of leaving the ministry after meeting someone. Would I meet somebody, for example, and where would I meet somebody?

Mike stopped his role as a priest in , and met someone just a year later. While visiting his aunts in Toledo, Mike saw a woman at Sunday mass who caught his eye.

It turned out that his aunt knew the woman, whose name was Norma Schroeder, and the two were eventually introduced. You know, that you met your wife in church, right? Though Mike was no longer a priest, he and his wife remained devout Catholics. In addition to their life within the church, they also ministered to Catholics who may have felt ostracized or unwelcome in the faith, which is against church rules.

Mike recalled a story from when David was young, when David asked why his sister's baptism was taking place in their home instead of at church. Or that they might find it hard to break from the feudal order that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated status the unordained will never enjoy?

Or that Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest?

Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself. Now, with children as victims and witnesses both, the corruption of priestly dominance has been shown for the evil that it is. Clericalism explains both how the sexual-abuse crisis could happen and how it could be covered up for so long.

If the structure of clericalism is not dismantled, the Roman Catholic Church will not survive, and will not deserve to. I know this problem from the inside.

Ironically, the Church, which sponsored my civil-rights work and prompted my engagement in the antiwar movement, made me a radical. I was the Catholic chaplain at Boston University, working with draft resisters and protesters, and soon enough I found myself in conflict with the conservative Catholic hierarchy. My priesthood.

I heard the confessions of young people wracked with guilt not because of authentic sinfulness but because of a Church-imposed sexual repressiveness that I was expected to affirm. Just by celebrating the Mass, I helped enforce the unjust exclusion of women from equal membership in the Church. I valued the community life I shared with fellow priests, but I also sensed the crippling loneliness that could result from a life that lacked the deep personal intimacy other human beings enjoy.

My relationship with God was so tied up with being a priest that I feared a total loss of faith if I left. That very fear revealed a denigration of the laity and illustrated the essential problem. If I had stayed a priest, I see now, my faith, such as it was, would have been corrupted. Still, the fact that Vatican II had occurred at all, against such great odds, was enough to validate a hope, half a century later, that the Church could survive the contemporary moral collapse of its leadership.

That was the hope kindled by the arrival, in , of the pope from Argentina. Pope Francis seemed to me, in the beginning, like a rescuer.

He cradled and kissed the blistering feet of a Muslim inmate in a Roman prison and made a pilgrimage to the U. He opened the door to Cuba and shut down the ancient Catholic impulse to convert the Jews. He has argued that religion is not a zero-sum enterprise in which the truth of one faith comes at the expense of the truth of others. The pope began as a man of science, which scrambles the old assumptions about the clash between religious belief and rational inquiry.

The chemist turned Jesuit is presumably familiar with the principle of paradigm shift—the overturning through new evidence of the prevailing scientific framework. Settled ideas are forever on the way to being unsettled. So too with religion.

But he holds to the fundamentals loosely. In his book The Name of God Is Mercy , Francis explores the connection between specifically religious ideas and the concerns that all human beings share. But today such longing for transcendence exists beyond categories of theism and atheism. Francis somehow gestured toward that horizon with innate eloquence. He offered less a message that explains than an invitation to explore. He has been attacked by proponents of unfettered free-market capitalism and by bigots who despise his appreciation of Islam.

Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, has attacked Francis for his criticism of nationalist populism and Francis draws fire in some circles as the embodiment of anti-Trump conviction.

But inside the Church, the fiercest opposition has come from defenders of clericalism—the spine of male power and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it.

Among the broader community of Catholics, the wedge issue has been the question of readmitting the divorced and remarried to the sacrament of Communion. The issue has sorely divided the hierarchy, and Francis has sided with those who would change the rule.

When the Catholic imagination, swayed by Augustine, demonized the sexual restlessness built into the human condition, self-denial was put forward as the way to happiness. The argument within the Church hierarchy on divorce and remarriage has amounted to an overdue attempt to catch up with the vast population of Catholic laypeople who have already changed their minds on the subject—including many divorced and remarried people who simply refuse to be excommunicated, no matter what the bishops say.

Foreshadowing these events was a letter addressed to the pope—and later leaked—by 13 cardinals ahead of a synod in , warning against any change on the question of divorce and remarriage.

Critics such as these worry that a shift in Church discipline on this single question will pave the way—even if Francis and his allies do not quite see it—to a host of other changes regarding matters of sexuality, gender, and indeed the entire Catholic worldview.

On this, the conservatives are right. All of which, again, points a finger at the priesthood itself and its theological underpinnings. That is the crux of the matter. For years, I refused to cede my faith to the corruptions of the institutional Church, but Vatican bureaucrats and self-serving inquisitors are not the issue now. The priests are. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus.

It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. In April, a bishop was charged with the rape and illegal confinement of a nun, whom he allegedly assaulted regularly over two years, in the southern state of Kerala. The bishop has denied the charges. The nun said she reported the bishop to the police only after appealing to Church authorities repeatedly—and being ignored. In February, a Washington Post report suggested that early in his pontificate, Francis learned about the systematic priestly abuse of institutionalized deaf children in Argentina , decades ago.

The abuse had originally been brought to light not by Church officials but by civil authorities. The deaf victims reported that they were discouraged from learning sign language, but that one hand sign often used by the abusive priests was the forefinger to the lips: Silence.

As for McCarrick, the cardinal was found guilty by a Vatican tribunal of abusing minors and was punished by being stripped of his clerical standing. In truth, this supposedly humiliating punishment meant only that McCarrick would now share the secular status of every other unordained person on the planet.

At the meeting, the bishops dutifully employed watchwords such as transparency and repentance , yet they established no new structures of prevention and accountability. An edict promulgated in March makes reporting allegations of abuse mandatory, but it applies only to officials of the Vatican city-state and its diplomats, and the reporting is not to civil authorities but to other Vatican officials.

Worse, he deflected the specifically Catholic nature of this horror by noting that child abuse and sexual malfeasance happen everywhere, as if the crimes of Catholic clergy are not so bad.

Coming like a punctuation mark the day after the Vatican gathering adjourned was a full report from Australia on the matter of Cardinal George Pell. In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless.

A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The abuse of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a different order, and not simply because of its global magnitude.

This symbol of Christ has come to stand for something profoundly wicked. But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that concern, and anguish should be reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent measure of our responses. Read: Catholics are desperate for tangible reforms on clergy sex abuse.

While a relatively small number of priests are pedophiles, it is by now clear that a far larger number have looked the other way. In part, that may be because many priests have themselves found it impossible to keep their vows of celibacy, whether intermittently or consistently. Such men are profoundly compromised. Gay or straight, many sexually active priests uphold a structure of secret unfaithfulness, a conspiracy of imperfection that inevitably undercuts their moral grit.

That such hubristic claptrap came from blatantly imperfect men did nothing to lighten the load of the admonition. I know from my own experience how priests are primed to feel secretly unworthy.

Whatever its cause, a guilt-ridden clerical subculture of moral deficiency has made all priests party to a quiet dissembling about the deep disorder of their own condition. That subculture has licensed, protected, and enabled those malevolent men of the cloth who are prepared to exploit the young.

The very priesthood is toxic, and I see now that my own service was, too. The habit of looking away was general enough to have taken hold in me back then. When I was the chaplain at Boston University, my campus-ministry colleague, the chaplain at Boston State College, was a priest named Paul Shanley, whom most of us saw as a hero for his work as a rescuer of runaways. In fact, he was a rapacious abuser of runaways and others who, after being exposed by The Boston Globe , served 12 years in prison.

It haunts me that I was blind to his predation, and therefore complicit in a culture of willed ignorance and denial. Insidiously, willed ignorance encompasses not just clerics but a vast population of the faithful. Catholics in general have perfected the art of looking the other way. He denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its niche but does nothing to dismantle it.