Years ago, someone asked me what it would take for the Vatican to reverse its stand on mandatory celibacy. Half in jest, half in earnest, I replied, “An unpaid electric bill, and a Vatican gone dark.”

Not a worthy motive for change, I admit -- a short-fall at the Vatican Bank, due to a short-fall in American dollars, but at that time I was ready to settle for anything to begin the reformation. No more.

Today, I’ve come to think that optional celibacy is too sacred a gift to be bought and sold in the spiritual/secular marketplace, manipulated by the shifting fortunes on Wall Street, and discussions on back stairways of the Curia’s headquarters. Can’t you just hear it? “A wife costs money!” “Children cost money!” “There will go the Church’s property!” “We cannot afford a non-celibate clergy. Let us be practical.”

Celibacy is a gift one should make first in the solitude of one’s soul, then, with a spiritual director, far from the commerce of laws, and profit and loss speculations. Can we not trust the Lord to care for a Church that first cares for its shepherds?

Before we laity get caught up in a dialogue regarding optional celibacy, we may need to do some studying, lest we waste time and effort sitting around the table exchanging ignorance.

Yes, we understand that the numbers of priests in relationship to the faithful of today and tomorrow look disastrous for the future, and we know more than we ever wanted to know about priests’ and bishops’ abuse of children, but about the ordinary lives of priests, the majority of us possess not a clue.

However, be not dismayed, for I have a suggestion for a book, guaranteed to be helpful. It’s a sleeper: The Other Side of the Altar: One Man’s life in the Catholic Priesthood , by Paul E. Dinter, published by Farrrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2003, 237 pp., $23.00.

Dinter, now married and rearing two stepdaughters, left the active ministry in 1964, after laboring in Rome, rural England, on an Ivy League campus, and in parish rectories of the archdiocese of New York. He lives in Cortlandt Manor, New York, where he directs an outreach program for homeless people.

Not here will you find the extensive, sobering stories of priests after they resigned from ministry, as in Shattered Vows , by David Rice; nor the unremitting, shocking accounts about modern seminaries in Goodbye, Good Men, by Michael S. Rose; nor the single-focused books of A.W. Richard Sipe, in Sex, Priests, and Power, and Celibacy, a Way of Loving, Living, and Serving; nor the scholarship of Fr. Donald B. Cozzens, Ph.D. in his brilliant and thought-provoking The Changing Face of the Priesthood.

However, don’t be misled. This is not a fluff book, by a long way, though it is an easy read, for the author has the gift of words and uses his talent well.

Always, he seems to be serving the reader, taking one back to his boyhood,
through the mysterious introduction into the liturgy and the life of an altar boy, where getting the movements and the Latin down perfectly appeared to be more important than consciously participating in the prayers.

Then, it was on to the junior seminary, where he says the teachers expended little energy on either the boys’ scholastic or intellectual development, waiting for later when the winnowing process was fairly well ended, and the stalwart would have earned special attention.

One cannot help but speculate about what different choices the young men might have made had they been personally encouraged in their studies, as well as in their spiritual lives, from day one, and what changes such dedication would have wrought in the lives of the teachers.

Coasting through the term, waiting for the uninspired students to drop out, doesn’t strike me as much of an incentive for bringing the highest quality of teaching and spiritual direction to seminarians, with eyes and hearts on the Holy Grail of the priesthood.

Dinter explains the high ideals of his colleagues when facing their first priestly assignments:

We did not want a priesthood that lived on the strength
of the mystique that had built up around it. We wanted to
be part of a profession that was respected for the fruits of
their labors, for how well we preached, counseled, advocated,
taught and built up the Body of Christ on earth. So we
determined to gird up our loins and go out to tilt at windmills,
to try to change not only society’s expectations of the Catholic
Church, but the church’s own expectations of its ordained
ministers. (p. 73-74)

Between 1964 and 1974, Dinter finished college, began theological studies; took a year off from the seminary, dated and taught high school, then returned to the seminary, was ordained, assigned to a parish, and, eventually to Columbia University as Catholic Chaplain.

During the fifteen years that followed, Dinter tells us his priesthood was rewarding, and that he was able to do his work, while pursuing a doctorate in biblical studies.

A new kind of life was ushered in for him when John O’Connor became the Archbishop of New York, and his auxiliary bishop, Edward Egan, became Dinter’s supervisor. Together, the formidable churchmen forced the young chaplain from his post in 1988, after which, he spent a year’s sabbatical in Rome.

Upon returning to New York and weathering an accusation of disloyalty to Cardinal O’Connor, Dinter was given a temporary assignment, after which, he was left dangling in the wind.

A friend offered him space in his rectory, leaving Dinter free to do some college teaching and fill in at various parishes on weekends for the next year and a half. It was during a final three-year teaching stint, that he was convinced both by group and private therapy that “celibacy had ceased to energize my participation in ministry; in fact, it was seriously crippling me. The physical, spiritual, and emotional loneliness was killing my spirit.”

He took a leave of absence for eleven months, then resigned from the priesthood permanently in August, 1994, thirty years after entering St. Joseph’s Seminary, nicknamed Dunwoodie for the section of Yonkers it claimed domination, having been built upon a monumental scale.

Dinter has told his story well, and in the telling, we gradually assimilate the nuances that made up his days and nights. In the end, we cannot help but wonder what might have been for him and all the priests who have left active ministry, if those responsible for shepherding the youngest shepherds of the flock could have been chosen from the among the most holy, dedicated leaders whom Dinter describes on many a page.

An older priest told Dinter that he continued in the priesthood because otherwise his life would be about smaller, daily matters.

Dinter goes on to say that every day when he rides the commuter trains to attend meetings concerning better service to the homeless of New York, or reviewing his daughter’s Italian lesson, or in paying bills with his wife, he does so as a justified sinner struggling to redeem the time. To him, these are all occasions of grace, not simply “smaller, daily matters.”.

He goes on to ask: “Am I holier (than when wearing the collar)? Only God knows, and God’s not telling. But I know I am more whole and even freer betimes to let go, to be undone, to let grace be grace, and to grow in spite of myself.”

May we each be able to say something like that as we continue on our journeys homeward, lay or clerical.

Blessings and peace to all.

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