Category Archives: Faith

The Problems with Married Priests?

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From Simcha Fisher (I’m quoting the whole thing so I can take this apart piece by piece):

Why doesn??t the Latin Rite Church just start ordaining married men again? If men can??t or won??t stay celibate, then why force the issue? Well, I peeked into the future, when married priests are commonplace, and this is what I heard in the pews:

??Well! I see the pastor??s wife is pregnant again! What is she trying to prove? Must be nice to pop ??em out year after year, while the parish has to support all those brats.??

or:

??Well! I see another year has gone by and the pastor??s wife still isn??t pregnant. A fine example they??re setting! I won??t have them teaching my children CCD, since his own wife is clearly on the Pill.??

and:

??I went to the rectory the other day to talk to Father about my divorce, and those damn kids of his wouldn??t shut up for a minute. Sounded like a herd of elephants running around up there ?? I couldn??t keep my thoughts straight. How can he give me advice about my family when he can??t even control his own???

or:

??I have to talk to someone about my kids, but I would never go to Father ?? his kids are so well-behaved, he could never understand what I??m going through. I swear, his wife must drug them or something ?? something ain??t right there.??

and:

??I see the pastor??s kids are taking tennis lessons! I guess they??re doing pretty well?? no need for me to leave anything in the basket this week, when we??re barely getting by.??

or:

??I see the pastor??s kids are wearing such ratty shoes. What a terrible example he sets! No one??s going to want to join a church that encourages you to have more kids than you can care for.??

and:

??I wanted to meet with Father to talk about the new brochures for the pro-life committee, and his secretary said he was busy ?? but on the drive home, I saw him at the McDonald??s playground, just fooling around with his kids! I guess I know where I stand in this parish! Harumph.??

or:

??Everyone thinks it??s so great that Father started all these holy hours and processions and prayer groups, but I saw two of his little ones sitting all alone, just looking so sad and neglected. It??s a shame that any children should grow up that way, without proper attention from their parents. Harumph.??

And so on, and so on. I??m sure you can think of more. Imagine if his wife had a job? Or imagine if she didn??t have a job? Imagine if his wife wore jeans? Imagine if she wore a veil? Imagine if he got an annulment, and then started a new family? Would the parishioners pay for alimony or child support? Imagine if the priest could get married, but was still single? Is he gay, or impotent? Is he hitting on me? Is he hitting on my daughter? [As Abby pointed out, no rite has ever allowed already-ordained priests to marry, so this wouldn’t be an issue!]

I??m paraphrasing here, but I remember a pathetic prayer uttered by the semi-fictional Don Camillo: ??Please, merciful Lord, if I have to blow my nose while I??m up at the altar, let me do it in a way that doesn??t offend anyone.??

And it wouldn??t just be a matter of doing the right thing and shrugging off unjust gossip ?? it would be so hard to know what is the right thing to do. I see how my husband struggles to work hard at his job, make enough money, and strategize for the future, because we??re all depending on him ?? and then comes home and puts it all aside to become the sympathetic and appreciative husband and the strong but playful dad. And he only has one family.

It??s hard enough for men to balance family and career ?? what if, as priests, they had to balance their biological family with a spiritual family of parishioners? Whose needs come first?

And did I mention? The average American Catholic diocesan priest makes between $15-30,000 a year.

Look, I know there are some families that could hack it. There are some that do, and I??m sure there are some that do very well, especially if the parish is close-knit and conservative, with a long, comfortable tradition of married priests. And I know we??re likely to see more married priests soon, since our beloved (and thrilling!) Benedict XVI has so warmly welcomed the Anglicans in.

How??s it going to go? I don??t know. I??m not saying it??s a bad idea; I??m just saying it??s not the no-brainer heal-all for anemic numbers in the seminaries. All the hypothetical nasty comments above are things that people say about decent, hard-working, LAY Catholic couples with private lives. Other people have no business judging them ?? and yet they do, all the time. How much worse would this gossip (and the attendant protest via empty collections basket and empty pews) be if the couple in question had much less claim to a private life? Parishioners tend to feel like they ??own?? their pastors. This can take the form of befriending and loving him, making him meals, and praying for him ?? but it can also take some uglier forms. I cannot imagine enduring such scrutiny as a pastor??s wife or child, especially without the graces of Holy Orders that help a priest survive his daily ordeal.

Simcha, you’re not that far off. I could make peoples’ skin crawl with the things that have been said to me and about me. In the last 9 years, I’ve had:

-people criticize me for getting a job outside the home (because “a smart girl like [me] could surely find some way to work at home”)
-people criticize my decisions when I was pregnant (and the fact that I hid it until someone guessed and called the entire church to tell them)
-one person tell me how I could have prevented the pre-eclampsia (more specifically HELLP Syndrome with a 30% abruption) and Daniel being born early if I’d done things differently when I was pregnant (because, you know, doctors electively choose to do c-sections at 3:45 a.m., right?)
-people criticize my clothes (apparently, I’m a Lutheran goth?)
-people complain that I do too much around the church
-people complain that I don’t do enough around the church
-people complain that I’m inhospitable because I told them they couldn’t come over randomly (while I was recovering from gallbladder surgery)
-people scream me out in public and then force me to apologize for making them make a scene
-people make up things and claim that I said them or that my husband said them
-people chew me out because my husband hasn’t been to visit them (because, you know, he’s OUT OF TOWN)
-people complain about my weird dietary habits (a.k.a lactose intolerance, FOOD ALLERGIES, and an inability to process grease)
-people use me as my husband’s message board (because, you know, they can’t walk 10 feet and tell him something)

So how do I survive this without the graces conveyed by Holy Orders?

1.) I blog. I use WordPress for a reason — passworded entries. I can get the toxic stuff out that way.
2.) I can separate the “wheat from the chaff”. In other words, I can separate the nasty people from the truly good-hearted people and I focus on the second group when I’m feeling like I want to convey bodily harm to the first group.
3.) I have friends outside of the church and the community. This goes with #1. Blogging has given me a network of people who have NOTHING to do with the church or with the community in which I live.
4.) In Minnesota, I took LONG walks. During some rough patches, I’d do an hour of taebo and then go for a 3-mile walk. I lost 25 lbs and my gallbladder. It also worked off some of the stress.
5.) I crochet. OK, I don’t do much of it right now because of Daniel but it was a way to work off some of the nervous energy.

As for whether it would solve the priest shortage, it wouldn’t. There’s a clergy shortage across the board regardless of whether you be Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Having a young priest or a young pastor with a family does not bring the young people to church either.

Regarding the balancing of family and parish, it’s one of those things where it’s possible if the people in the parish are relatively sane and realize that the pastor has a family and that it would be NICE if he got to see them. Stuff like graduations, school plays, choir concerts, and such can be scheduled in between council meetings, Confirmation classes, and parish duties. Jon did not miss any pre-natal appointments that he wanted to attend and would have been at Daniel’s birth if it hadn’t been such an emergency event. (I had to be transferred to a hospital 90 minutes away in the middle of the night and was there for literally 30-45 minutes before they wheeled me into the O.R. for my c-section.)

Emergency calls happen. It’s the nature of being in a profession where you are on-call 24/7. However, I can count on one hand the number of calls between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. in the 7 1/2 years that Jon has been ordained. When those calls come in (even if it’s early evening and he’s just gotten home), I never question it. It goes with the territory.

Finally, I think it is important to remind everyone that the ministry is a vocation and a calling. My husband does not do it for the money — he does it because God called him to it.

My Sanctity of Life Week Post

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I heard on Air1 that it’s Sanctity of Life week and I felt like I should weigh in. (In other words, free posting topic!)

My Sanctity of Life story comes from my pregnancy with Daniel. At one of my appointments, Dr. Awesome asked if I wanted the MSAFP test (it tests for Down’s Syndrome and spina bifida). I didn’t really feel like getting it but Jon wanted it so I gave in. A week later, Dr. Awesome herself left a message on my answering machine at home which was a red flag. (Nurses usually call with test results. Dr. Awesome calling meant something was wrong.) It turns out that the test came back elevated for Down’s Syndrome and they were getting my 3-D ultrasound scheduled in Great Falls ASAP. After getting 5 phone calls in a 10 minute period, my co-workers caught on that there was a problem and a lot of them were freaking out for my sake.

I was more angry because the reason they were getting the ultrasound moved up was so that they could do amniocentisis if need be and abort the baby if the amnio came back showing Down’s Syndrome. Seriously, if Daniel had been born with Down’s Syndrome, we would have been OK with that. He was a WANTED child and would be a LOVED child.

The 3-D ultrasound showed that he was fine (and the “elevated” level was a 1% chance which I wish I’d known — it would have saved a lot of people a lot of worry). The doctor doing the ultrasound (my peri-natalogist Dr. Fabulous) was the one who delivered Daniel two months later so it was good that I had the patient relationship with him.

Compassion Still Exists

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The Blaze: Compassionate Pilot Delays Flight For Grieving Grandfather

I’ve been wanting to weigh in on this for awhile. The pilot’s decision to wait brings me to tears. I’m sure it probably inconvenienced a bunch of people on the plane (though I think once they knew what was up, they would understand) and yet this pilot made the decision to delay the flight and even met the grieving grandfather on the jetway to let him know that he’d get the guy to Denver and that he was sorry for his loss.

The travel blog Elliot.Org weighed in on it and called the pilot’s words “the quote of the year”.

Thank God for people like this pilot. In a world where time is money, they bring some sanity.

An Interesting Encounter at $tarbux

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Background: Due to my presence at $tarbux almost daily, I tend to run into people repeatedly and get into conversations with them. A few weeks ago, I struck up a conversation with a man and his companion about the nature of sin and baptism and all that.

Today: I walked by a man who I thought was the companion and waved. It turned out to not be the companion but an Egyptian professor of economics at UC Irvine and several other Egyptian men, one of whom was quite effusive and kissed my cheek when I was telling him about Daniel. (This is about the time I realized that these were not the men I had spoken to before.) We had a great conversation about Islam and how people have corrupted it with politics and they seemed sorry to have to leave.

The poignant thing about the conversation today was that they all individually felt like they had to assure me that they were not terrorists. I laughed and told them that I knew that they weren’t, but it saddened me that they felt that they had to tell me that. (It possibly might have had something to do with the bombing of the Coptic church in Alexandria.) Do we Americans come off as being so stupid that we see any Muslim as a terrorist?

Still… it was strange to shake hands with them because usually it’s considered taboo for Muslim men to touch Muslim women. They were tickled pink when I told them that if I had known that they were Arabic speakers, I would have greeted them with the word “salaam”.

Still… an interesting encounter and one that definitely made my day.

Rules for Blogging as Clergy or a Clergy Spouse

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If you’ve read my blog for at least five years or more, you know that my husband is a Lutheran pastor and I’m thus a pastor’s wife. A number of my online friends are clergy buddies or people who are married to clergy and I’ve seen bad things happen to people who aren’t judicious in what they put on their blogs or on Facebook. (It’s happened to me too though it was nothing I wrote but rather the fact that I had a blog.) So… in the interest of helping out any clergy hopefuls (and also giving a resource to certain synod staff who read my blog), here are my rules for blogging as clergy or a clergy spouse.

1.) Don’t use your whole name. My last name is pretty searchable and while this blog isn’t the first item that comes up, it does eventually come up on a Google search. Unless you *REALLY* want people (including parishioners) reading everything you write, don’t use your whole name.

2.) Pseudonyms are good. A good clergy blog friend of mine uses pseudonyms for her husband, sons, church, and town. It means that she’s a bit harder to find online if someone does a search for her. While I use my real name, I think creating your own pseudonym is a better idea. Nickname your church(es) and your town (if you live in a small one).

3.) Anything you say can and WILL be used against you so password the good stuff. Had a crappy council meeting? If you blog it, you need to password it. WordPress lets you do that and Livejournal even hides posts that are “friends-only” and will let you filter who sees what. If you go with a CMS like WordPress, title things in a way that doesn’t draw attention to what they might be. For example, “Stupidity at Church Council” probably isn’t a good title. “Frustration” might work better.

4.) Don’t “friend” parishioners or give out your password. If you have a Facebook, consider making a censored one for parishioners so they aren’t privy to your personal life, especially if ANY of your status updates involve church. If you have a blog, don’t give your password out to people in your real life. If those people get pissed at you, you’re opening yourself up for a whole lot of trouble as well as hours of work re-passwording everything.

5.) Don’t use your blog to air the dirty laundry in your parish. If you’re pissed about something and need to get it off your chest, do a private entry. (Both WordPress and Livejournal will let you do that.) This harkens back to rule #3 — your people will get royally irritated if they think that you’re using your blog as a platform to harp about them, so don’t give them a reason to think that you are.

6.) Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to see. We’ve all heard about people losing their jobs or being denied acceptance to Ivy League schools over a stupid picture on Facebook. Your blog functions similarly. People might not be able to access the actual entry but they *can* find it accidentally in a Google search. Don’t put something up there for them to find.

7.) If you’re a clergy spouse, remember that anything you say has the effect of your spouse saying it. I’m rather passionate about a lot of issues and I either have to password my rants or take a milder tone because anything I say will be co-opted as something that my husband said. It isn’t fair but it’s a reality. If you have a rant, password it or put it in a private entry. Better yet, have a separate passworded blog for your ranting — it’s what some of my friends do.

This isn’t a totally humorous entry but it’s one that I thought was important and timely, especially as I’m watching pastor friends venting openly on Facebook and thinking “you really need to protect that….”

The Problems with Militancy

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Jen of Blag Hag had an interesting post on being the token atheist at a grad student gathering for her program. (Why yes… I’m a fan of the blog of an avowed and vocal atheist. Is there a problem here?)

I don’t have to purposefully hide parts of my life because I’m afraid it’ll alienate people from me. Last night I was sure as hell not going to mention how most of my blogging is about atheism and as aggressive as Dawkins, or that I founded a club for atheist students, or that I was on the board for the Secular Student Alliance. And when someone asked how I had met Richard Dawkins, I didn’t mention how we’re being published together in the same book about atheism. I lied by omission about something I’m incredibly proud about.

Immediately afterward I felt bad for not being true to myself, but these are going to be my coworkers for the next five years. I don’t bring up religion or my atheism in class or at work because I don’t want it to be an issue, just as I try not to bring up politics. But when it is brought up, I’m not the type to stand there and take it. And thus I feel like the odd woman out.

I can relate to her situation in that I dealt with similar situations when I was in college because I’d be the token Christian at a gathering or in one of my classes. I had more than one class where people would criticize me for believing the way I did and in a few cases, the professor encouraged it! I had people tell me that I was a fundamentalist, that everything I believe is intolerant of others, and that I shouldn’t be in my degree program (at that time Biology) because I obviously didn’t believe in evolution. (Actually, I see no problem between Genesis and evolutionary theory.) There were times when I just kept my mouth shut because it just wasn’t worth the aggravation to try and correct people and tell them what I *actually* believe and that their stereotype didn’t quite fit me. For example, I’m respectful that not everybody believes the same way I do. My parents aren’t Christian and while my dad is very passionately anti-religious, my mom raised me to be respectful of the beliefs of others. While I do hope in my heart that my words and actions reflect Christ, I can also talk shop with pretty much every other faith group there is.

Jen’s issue was that she brought up that she’s a fan of Richard Dawkins who is pretty outspoken about his atheism. I can understand people being turned off by him just as I can completely understand people being turned off by the late Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. When people make derogatory remarks about other faiths and are aggressive about it, it can really turn people off even if they do happen to share a belief system. I have to deal with the crap that “fundamentalist” Christians pull which include all the stupid remarks about Islam made after 9/11 as well as being lumped into the same group as the moron in Florida who wanted to burn the Qur’an on 9/11, endangering US troops in Afghanistan and created a really negative view of the US in the eyes of Muslims abroad. It’s the problem with militancy — Muslims are branded as terrorists because of the actions of a small minority, any pro-life Christian is viewed to be in league with those who bomb abortion clinics or shoot doctors, and atheists are viewed as intolerant because people like Madalyn Murray-O’Hair were that way. Militants make the rest of us look really bad.

Jen goes on to talk about how she was totally comfortable with the people who are part of Seattle Atheists because she could just be herself. Truthfully, I’m a little jealous because I don’t always have that luxury when I get together with a group of Christians, even those who are Episcopalian or Lutheran. There always seems to be something wrong with me like I believe homosexuality is a sin, I wear too much black, I don’t believe that all Muslims are terrorists (I’ve been treated better by Muslim groups than I have by churches I’ve attended), or I’m not what people envision a pastor’s wife to be. (There’s another post topic — unreal expectations for clergy spouses.) I think the only gatherings where I’m comfortable and able to be myself (though I don’t mention my blog) are the stitch n’ b*tch groups I’ve been part of.

It’s also kind of interesting that Jen would run into that problem (being the token atheist) in her program because she’s in the Genome Studies program at the University of Washington — a program where you’d expect there to be a number of non-theists and in a state (and city) where you wouldn’t find a massive evangelical Christian presence like you would in Indiana where Jen is from. Washington is the most unchurched state in the nation — you’d think *I* would be the minority, not her.

I guess my point is this: stereotyping hurts people just like militancy does. They create a false image of what people may look like and makes it harder for those who don’t fit that mold. Jen and I are polar opposites in a lot of ways but we both want a place where we belong and those who represent their faith in seemingly intolerant ways make it harder for us to find those places.

Jen, you’re totally welcome at my blog. I’ll even let you skip over any entries on faith.