From Imperial Church to Beloved Community: Memoir of a Lay Catholic Priest - Tapa blanda

In July, 1968, Father John Carrigan was at the desk in his parish church in Pulaski Tennessee when he learned of Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter, "Humanae Vitae," reaffirming the prohibition of artificial birth control. Father Carrigan feared that his days as a canonical Catholic priest were numbered. He saw the proclamation of the pope as a rejection of the majority report of the Birth Control Commission that was made up of married lay people as well as clerical experts. He saw it as a a gauntlet thrown down by the hierarchy, rejecting the inclusion of lay voices in decision-making in the church. Thus he also saw it as a rejection of the efforts of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council to balance the teaching of papal infallibility of the First Vatican Council with an increased voice for Catholic laity. In short, he saw the encyclical as an insensitive imposition of authority over the real suffering of married men and women in order to preserve a theological fine point that had no moral implications whatever. Eighty-five percent of married American Catholics have ignored the encyclical. Mr. Carrigan insists that he has written his book to restore credibility to the church that he and many Catholics still love. He wants to help restore the pastoral spirit and teachings of Vatican II and the open window policies of Pope John XXIII. He agrees with Franciscan retreat master and writer, Richard Rohr, that if the Vatican can reject the spirit and teachings of the Second Vatican Council, all Catholics can reject the spirit and teachings of all the councils. He believes that those who argue that nothing happened in the Second Vatican Council have been habituated to the legalistic thinking of previous councils and are not attuned to the pastoral thinking that was expressed by Council Fathers and that had been the mindset of Jesus and the gospels.Throughout his adult years, Mr. Carrigan has been visited in dreams by the young woman he fell in love with when he was seventeen years old and whom he left to enter the seminary. He attributes the dreams to his failure to grieve her loss when he entered the seminary. Neither he nor she have had any regrets. She went on to be a wife and mother and he, to gain the knowledge and grasp of his church that enables him to work to reform the church he loves. When a Catholic priest leaves the active ministry of the church, the Vatican "laicizes" him. They do not take away his priesthood, since, according to Catholic theology, that is impossible. To laicize a priest means that the church returns him to the lay state. The author believes that such a person becomes a lay priest. That is what Mr. Carrigan considers himself to be. He also refers to himself as a Catholic priest-at-large, partly because he functions independently of a bishop or religious superior, and partly, he jokes, because when his name is mentioned to Archbishop Daniel Buechlein of Indianapolis, his excellency asks, "Is he still at large?"