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You may enjoy the following related articles:</strong><br><br> <li><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/45/story_4585_1.html">Afterlife: An Ex-Priest's Story</a><br>By Luke Timothy Johnson<br><br></li> <li><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/45/story_4586_1.html">When the Priesthood Isn't Forever</a><br>By Ralph McInerny<br><br></li> <li><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/45/story_4589_1.html">Don't Treat Married Priests Like Pariahs</a><br>By John Horan<br><br></li> <li><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/164/story_16487_1.html">The Priest Shortage and the Simple Solution</a><br>By Deborah Caldwell<br><br></li> <li><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/102/story_10237_1.html">Does Celibacy Work for the Catholic Church?</a><br>By Eugene Cullen Kennedy<br><br><!--Removed Text Begins Here Five years after my father left his position as a parish priest in Boston and my mother left the convent to marry him, the home they made together became a gathering place for other former Catholic clergy. I can remember one Saturday when we were expecting the usual crowd—the Married Priest People, my siblings and I called them. The preparations for their arrival were always the same. * Dad removed his vestments from their dry-cleaning bags in the front hall closet. My sister, Kathleen, stood on a chair to rinse out the blue ceramic chalice for the dining room Eucharist that would start the party. Mom cajoled my brother, Sean, from his basement bedroom hideout. I was the youngest, too small to do anything but take it all in. * Soon the guests began to arrive. I could never remember all the names, but I knew they were families like ours: the fathers still priests, the mothers once nuns, the children never quite sure what their roles should be. We all filed into the dining room, where the table had been set with improvised liturgical elements: the ceramic chalice filled with pink Zinfandel; a dinner plate piled with torn bits of Near East pita bread. And a handful of forsythia branches, their yellow buds beginning to open with their cut ends now in water. * That's how I think of these gatherings now: flowers growing on branches cut from their roots. It was a common theme of the sermons we heard, and not without scriptural precedent: there was the stem of Jesse--the prophet Isaiah's promise of Messiah coming against all odds--and the staff of Joseph, the tale of the divine selection of the Virgin Mary's husband, the old carpenter whose walking stick bloomed to make clear to all who it was that should care for the Son of God. Whatever the biblical reference, the stories told at these household liturgies tended to have the same moral: that life could spring forth anywhere-spontaneously, stubbornly. * When all the guests had crowded into our tiny dining room, Dad or one of the several priest/fathers in attendance would stand at the head of the table in his vestments. If it was too hot for all that finery, the celebrant would make do with just a stole over his short-sleeved Oxford shirt, like chaplains in some tropical war zone. The other adults packed in around the table were usually dressed for the season and the summer activities that would follow the liturgy, badminton and swimming, the prospect of which made it difficult for the kids to sit still. * One of the mothers would always see you if you went for the door, so the escape tactic that worked for me was to slump lower and lower in the big dining room chair until I was entirely under the table. Hidden by the curtain of the tablecloth, I'd be free to dig into my pockets for pieces of the miniature magic kit that at the time was my favorite toy. The best trick involved an orange plastic box into which a nickel could be placed. I would snap the lid on top, shake the box so I could hear the coin rattle inside, then take the lid off and--abracadabra, hocus pocus-the money was gone. * <em>Hocus pocus</em>--a bit of fake Latin, I would later learn, a medieval parody of <em>Hoc est corpus meum</em>, the ritual words of transubstantiation, the spell for which my parents' friends now waited. Magic above the table, magic below. * "This is my body," I would hear Dad say. "This is my blood." * The Married Priest People were a ragtag community, full of men and women who had been through the ecclesiastical wringer. Some priests who left their service in the church found other work right away. Using the diverse skill set they'd acquired in their parishes, they became teachers and professors, social workers and businessmen, or, as my father eventually did, psychologists, lending their priestly ears to the clinical confessions of therapy and analysis. The men who made such transitions without difficulty were the minority, though. After a decade or more spent sheltered in the church, most, my father included, had a hard time readjusting to the world. Their families, like ours, seemed kept afloat by strong-willed women, who often found themselves supporting their households while their husbands struggled to find their secular sea legs. It was, it seems to me now, a community that included an inordinate number of damaged people; damaged by the church, damaged by leaving it, damaged by loving it still. * Their devotion to the Catholic Church, and to the changing of it, informed every part of their lives. The result was the strangeness of Catholic ritual transposed onto the ordinariness of our suburban household; symbolic actions that felt like theater in an auditorium-sized church around our dining room table had an intimacy and immediacy that moved me before I was old enough to wonder why. * All well and good as far as my mother was concerned, but no matter how moving or genuinely supportive such at-home liturgies were to these men who wore exile as their cross, Mass in the dining room was not, could never be, church as she understood the word. * This is the hold of the Catholic worldview that my mother developed in the parishes and convents of Irish Boston: even as she married a priest, even as she accepted and agreed with him that he should remain a priest despite the protestations of his superiors, it seems my mother could not but view priests who married as damaged goods where performance of the liturgy was concerned. She'd left the Sisters of St. Joseph with none of the looking back that plagued my father, but there was something of the nun in her. She needed music and vestments, candles and incense, stained-glass windows and the tinkling of bells in order to feel that she had worshipped properly. Nevertheless, for all her ambivalence, my mother would still join the others in the torn bits of pita bread that passed for the Eucharist those weekend evenings. Why shouldn't she? Chances are she had already attended an actual Mass earlier that day, so her ritual bases were covered. * My father meanwhile insisted that "'church" was not a place but an occasion, a holy occurrence--something that happened, as the Gospel says, "whenever two or more gather" in Jesus' name. As for communion, it was just what it sounded like, a coming together with God. It was the church's insistence that centralized authority was necessary for sacramental experience that led to the great abuses of its power. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don't get Dad started. Imagine this discussion casually asserting itself at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. My mother looks down at her mug of tea, lifts the teabag and lets it drip back into the cup. "Yes, dear," she'd say, "I'm sure it's still a <em>real</em> sacrament when you do it." And then she would bundle us up and out the door to church. Removed Text Ends Here--></li>