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Photo By David Wasinger
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Bill Proud served as a Catholic priest for 28 years until
he left to marry Pat.
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If God is love and the Catholic Church is about bringing people closer to God, why is it bad for a priest to fall in love?
The continuing child abuse scandal in the church leaves many Catholics asking why devoted priests who want healthy relationships with other adults must leave the priesthood while those who abuse kids get to stay.
In 28 years as a priest in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, leaving never occurred to Bill Proud -- until he met a woman named Pat. He recalls the saying, "True love is friendship that caught on fire."
"That's what happened to me," he says.
Falling in love forced Proud to make a very difficult decision. Ordained in 1965, he had survived the tumultuous 1960s and '70s, when many men left the Catholic priesthood.
"I was very happy as a priest," he says. "I enjoyed every minute of it."
At first, Proud and Pat were friends. After a time of discernment, he realized he loved her.
"At some point you know that it's moved beyond friends," he says.
They considered remaining friends or even waiting until he retired to be together.
"At that point it's when I really had to face what is it that I really want -- and I wanted to be with her," he says. "The biggest thing I had to deal with is I didn't want to hurt people."
'This good old boy club'
Proud served as a parish priest in Kenwood for eight years before leaving in 1993. Parishioners were very supportive, he says.
"I probably got approximately 300 notes, letters and cards," he says. "Out of that 300, 295 of them were very positive."
The Catholic Telegraph, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, ran some letters from people who supported Proud's choice. Others expressed disappointment.
"I had a few messages that people were going to pray that I wouldn't burn in hell for all eternity," he says.
Proud was concerned about letting down his family.
"I was the only priest in the family, a German-Irish, Catholic family," he says.
He called his sister -- "a good Catholic," he says -- and said he needed to speak with her, but not on the phone. When he arrived and told her his decision, she started crying. She feared he was visiting to announce he had cancer.
Proud says his family supported his decision. He and Pat were barred, however, from marrying in a Catholic church, because he'd left the priesthood without getting permission -- a process called "laicization." Back then, he says, the Vatican wasn't granting such permission -- and it rarely does still.
A liberal Baptist minister with whom Proud served as a chaplain in the Army Reserves agreed to marry the couple in the ceremony they wanted. The wedding was at the Withrow Nature Preserve in Anderson Township.
Proud, who left the priesthood with a master's degree in counseling, does corporate training for Concern: Employee Assistance Program.
"When I was a priest, people felt like they had to come and say something spiritual or (about) the Bible," he says.
But the problems people approached him with when he was a priest are the same he deals with as a counselor.
Proud says he wouldn't return to the priesthood now even if allowed, because at age 63 he's close to retirement. The hardest part about leaving the priesthood was making the decision, he says.
"The difficulty was well before I made the decision to leave," he says. "Going from the priesthood to husband to stepdad to now step-granddad was pretty easy. It was fun. It was an adventure."
Proud and his wife are members of Good Shepherd Parish in Montgomery. "People will often say, 'You left the church,' and I say, 'No, no, I never left the church. I left the priesthood.' "
He still goes skiing with friends who are priests, trips he's taken for the past 20 years. He says the priests at his church couldn't be nicer.
Nearly 10 years after leaving the priesthood, Proud still is licensed by the state to officiate at weddings. Many times the couples he marries have Catholic roots but the church has denied them annulments from previous marriages or their hearts are set on outdoor weddings, which their parishes won't allow.
Allowing priests to be married wouldn't solve all the church's problems, Proud says; but he believes it would attract more people to the priesthood. He also believes women should be ordained.
"I think women have so much to offer," he says. "It would break down this good old boy club, and it just has to happen."
'They're so out of touch'
It's not only former church professionals who believe priests should be allowed to marry. So does a woman serving as a pastoral associate in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she says most Catholic parishioners would agree.
"The way the people think is so far from what the hierarchy thinks," she says. "They're so out of touch."
The pastoral associate believes many men who left the priesthood to get married feel they can't contribute to the church's ministry anymore -- especially those who, like Proud, left without being laicized. An additional loss is the effort and cost the church put into educating and training them.
"That's an injustice to all those people who make contributions to the church," she says.
She rejects some of the reasons given for mandatory celibacy, including practical questions such as housing priests' families. There are empty rectories within the archdiocese that could house two or three families each, she says.
The pastoral associate says ending mandatory celibacy would benefit the church, because priests' wives and children would get involved. Ministry isn't something that you can do as a job separate from your family, she says.
"If we had married priests, we'd probably get their whole family to minister in the church for the price of one priest," she says.
As it is, men who leave the priesthood to get married often move away, leaving people they've ministered to for years.
"I think most priests who leave don't stay in their same parish and often time they don't stay in the same city," the pastoral associate says. "I don't think (the parishioners) blame the priest. If they're looking to blame anybody, they blame the system that drove the priest away."
The problem isn't celibacy, the pastoral associate says. The problem is mandatory celibacy.
"I don't have any problem with celibacy if someone is called to that, but a lot of people aren't," she says.
Having other priests leave affects those who remain in the clergy.
"It doesn't do much for the morale of the priests who stayed," she says. "It probably affects them as much or more as it would the parishioners."
A priest forever
The irony is that not all priests have to be celibate. The Rev. Gregory Lockwood is a Catholic priest who's married and has five children. He currently is pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Church in Riverside.
Lockwood was a married Lutheran minister when he converted to Catholicism. Although married, he was allowed to become a priest because, raised outside the church, there was no expectation of celibacy, he says. The Vatican determined he had a vocation and approved his ordination.
Converting to Catholicism wasn't the first conversion in his life. A nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy, Lockwood didn't believe in God until he was 22. His wife was a lifelong Catholic.
"I was an atheist at the time, loudly complaining about all the kneeling," he says of their wedding.
He was 400 feet under the North Atlantic, serving on a submarine, when he changed.
"I came to a point in my life where I realized my biggest flaw (was) my lack of faith," he says.
Although Lockwood is living proof that married men can serve as Catholic priests, he doesn't believe removing the celibacy rule would lead more people into the priesthood.
"The priesthood has always been a sacrificial kind of giving institution," he says. "If you put up one barrier to the call of service and that barrier is removed, there's probably going to be another one."
Being a priest isn't a job with high prestige or high pay, according to Lockwood. He says a call from God is unconditional.
"We live in a very self-indulgent culture," he says. "The call to church service is a radical thing."
After Vatican II -- the church council that modernized the Catholic Church -- many men in the seminary came to believe a lot more would change, including celibacy, according to Lockwood.
"They were ordained thinking things were going to change," he says.
The result is many disappointed middle-aged priests, which is hardly good for business.
"I have folks that come to the parish down here, and it's because I'm happy," he says.
Lockwood knows the priesthood isn't a popular profession now.
"It used to be that having a son in the seminary was a mark of honor for the family," Lockwood says. "Now they try to talk them out of it."
Irish, Italian and German Catholics are no longer ghettoized, he says, and they often want their children to accomplish what the mainstream considers success.
"That's what I hear from my parishioners: 'We're glad you're a priest, Father. But we wouldn't wish it on our own kids,' " Lockwood says.
When he taught in a seminary in St. Louis, his wife spent a great deal of time talking with students about the difficulties of being a priest and having a family. The hours required of a priest often make it hard to participate in family activities. For example, Lockwood says, his daughter plays select soccer, and he hasn't been able to see any of her out-of-town tournaments in three years.
Meanwhile, the counselor and grandfather formerly known as the Rev. William Proud, who left the priesthood to find love and family, still encounters affection and respect for what he used to do.
"I get a lot of people still call me 'Father,' " he says.
At an outdoor wedding he performed for a bride and groom from large Catholic families, the bride's father offered a toast for "Father Bill and his lovely wife, Pat."
"In his mind, I was Father Bill," Proud says. "Theologically it's true -- you're a priest forever."
This article is part of a national project in which more than 30 alternative weekly newspapers nationwide are participating. Visit the AlterNet Web site to read other stories on married priests and the Catholic Church reform movement: www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=35
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