All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [31]
So in October 1967, while concluding his lecture at Notre Dame University before a room of budding theologians, Kavanaugh removed his collar and publicly announced his resignation from the priesthood. It was a shocking move that brought the house to its feet. One week later, the Notre Dame Alumni Association took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in an attempt to tame the “enthusiastic approval” from the public. Kavanaugh’s publisher offered him a half-page counter ad. He accepted the offer and wrote:
I am resigning from the Catholic priesthood in personal protest against the refusal of the hierarchy of the institutional Church to bring about reform.… I can no longer wear the collar nor accept the title of “Father,” when the institution I represent can cut off from communion the divorced and remarried, can refuse to admit its error in the matter of birth control, can ignore the plea of priests for marriage, can continue to reduce the principles of Christ to instruments of fear and guilt.… I cannot continue to be identified with a power structure that permits only token changes while the screams of millions are not heard.1
In his book, Kavanaugh further explained:
If I were to leave the priesthood because celibacy makes no sense and hides the very Christian love it once was meant to serve, I would be a renegade, a traitor, a man without a home. I would still be a priest, but a wretched and lonely one, adrift from family and friends. If I were to marry, my parents would be asked to ignore the wife I chose.… They would reject me, the son who made them proud and happy, the son who wants to do it still. They would turn away and offer all their misery to God. They would sneak to Church, avoid the pastor, fear each conversation that could whisper of their shame, and wonder where they failed in their labors for my life.2
It was 1981, I was a forty-seven-year-old priest, and I wanted to marry as well. So at the end of my twelve months apart from Roslyn, after a season of discerning, it was time for a decision. My earlier vows deemed it a sin to marry. I had been warned. But in those twelve months, it had become clear to me that the formal priesthood no longer fit; the greater sin would be not to marry. I had more than one Franciscan friend encourage me to request to be laicized, or given lay status. This is an official title in the church that essentially means being defrocked, stripped of priestly function and privilege. In my particular situation, taking on this status would have meant agreeing to these three terms:
1. I had never had the calling to be a priest.
2. I had lost my vocation.
3. I had been seduced.
If I had agreed to these terms, I would have remained in good standing within the church and might have had a slim possibility to continue my preaching and teaching ministry within. But those terms simply were not true. I could not, with any sense of integrity, give my consent.
Another sense of the word discernment is “a cutting away.” In order to fit into my new life, I realized I could not merely be laicized. I could not agree to the untrue qualifications, which meant that getting to where I wanted—to be married—would require a metaphorical cutting away from my vocation as a priest.
And if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to hell.
Matthew 5:30
1 Father James Kavanaugh, A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (Highland Park, IL: Stephen J. Nash, 1967), epilogue.
2 Ibid., 11.
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I phoned