When Charles Ara fell in love, at the age of 39, he faced an
anguished choice. As a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, he had taken a
vow of celibacy. But after working alongside the 28-year-old religion educator
in his parish for almost three years, he felt that his vows had become
impossible to live out honestly.

"I
struggled with that decision," he says. "I agonized over it for about
a year. It was probably very unfair to my wife-to-be, to ask her to wait while
I worked through my own issues."

Ultimately,
Charles Ara, who still calls himself Father, says, "I decided to add love
and marriage to my priesthood."

The church
did not look kindly on Ara's decision. "The pastor announced that no one
could attend my wedding," Ara says. "A bishop told my parents they
could not attend."

But on the
day of the ceremony, at a parishioner's home, his parents were not the only
faithful who made the decision to support Ara. Hundreds of uninvited
parishioners showed up. On October 10, 1970, more than 300 Catholics watched as
several married priests, one Orthodox priest, one Episcopalian, and a group of
nuns presided over the marriage of Charles Ara and Shirley Meyers. The wedding
party ran out of food, what with the unexpected turnout, but the guitar music
from the '60s played on.

While the
Church does not recognize him as such, Ara, a father of four, still considers
himself a Roman Catholic priest. "It affected my faith," Ara says.
"But I will always love my church, and my faith." Ara now works as a
marriage and family counselor. He does seem to miss the leadership role he had
as a priest, though --- he's running for Congress.

Ara is one
of as many as 100,000 men worldwide who have left the Roman Catholic
priesthood, many of them in order to marry. In the US there are as many as
20,000 married priests. (Conservative estimates put the number lower; there
exists no official figure). Thousands of these men have taken a certain
Canonical law to heart: Once a priest, always a priest.

Despite the
fact that the Church hierarchy no longer recognizes their right to officiate,
they still perform weddings, baptisms, and even the occasional mass. The Church
may have turned its back on them, but these men still have hope for the Church.
They represent an organized, vocal, and dedicated group at the margins of
Catholic life in the United States and Europe. They may even represent the
Church's best hope for the future.

Today's
Catholic Church has been watching its moral authority
erode with every damaging headline about sexual abuse by its priests. The
Church's veil of secrecy --- its policy of keeping victims quiet with expensive
settlements and shuffling abusers quietly from parish to parish --- has
exploded in its face. That known child molesters were quietly shifted around
within the church throws a criminal taint onto the entire hierarchy. And the irony
is not lost on married priests: While they neither harmed minors nor lied
about their sexual choices, the Church abandoned them, often dramatically, at
the same time that it shielded sexual predators.

The scandal
is bringing new, intense pressure to bear on an organization with a long
history of dedicated resistance to change. But resistance may be wavering.
Gallup polls show that three in four Catholics in America believe the Church
has been handling the scandals badly. And in June, at a conference in Dallas,
Texas, the bishops' statements showed that they are more sensitive than ever to
public opinion.

On July 20,
Voice of the Faithful, www.voiceofthefaithful.org, an influential new lay
organization, is holding a conference in Boston in an attempt to galvanize
further change and provide a forum for the Catholic public. The bishops will be
paying attention.

"The
space holds 5,000 and we are expecting to fill it," says Mike Emerton, a
VOTF spokesperson. Besides supporting victims of abuse and priests of
integrity, Voice of the Faithful's primary goal is to push for the laity's
inclusion in Church governance.

There's a
lot more at stake than just arcane questions of Church governance. The laity's
role is crucial: it's the central axis that connects a host of hot-button
issues for Catholic America --- optional celibacy for priests, birth control,
and the ordination of women.

"The
underpinning of all this is really a level of diametric opposition of two
totally different world views about what the Church is supposed to be,"
says Russ Ditzel, an activist for a priesthood of single and married men and
women with the Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service (CORPUS). "It's
a clash of the Church as the people of God, and as a hierarchical, structured
organization."

If the
Church is forced to listen to the laity, optional celibacy for Catholic priests
--- for which massive numbers of Catholics have expressed support in numerous
polls and surveys --- is likely to be one of the first items on the agenda.

While
optional celibacy is at best a remote possibility under the current Pope, in
many ways it is one of the least controversial issues. Celibacy is not dogma,
it's a rule passed in the 12th century. And the Catholic Church already has
married priests --- scores of Anglican priests who were allowed to switch to
Roman Catholicism, even though they were already married. Homosexuality, for
example, is a much more explosive topic, despite some experts' belief that as
much as 30 percent of the Catholic priesthood is gay.

Added
urgency comes from another unavoidable Catholic
crisis: a shortage of priests. In 1975, America had 60,000 Catholic priests; by
2001 there were just over 45,000. Their numbers continue to decline at a rate
of about 12 percent a year. For individual regions, the burn rates translate
into dramatic declines: in 1966 in Chicago, there were 1340 priests. That
number has now dropped to 657.

The numbers
in the seminaries are even direr. While there were around 47,000 seminarians in
1965, in 1997 there were only 5,000 (according to figures cited by Chester
Gillis in "Roman Catholicism in America," from the Columbia
Contemporary American Religion series). Ironically, the ranks of Catholics in
the United States are growing, swelling with an influx of Catholic immigrants
from Latin America.

To put it
baldly, the American priest appears to be a dying breed. But if the Church were
to welcome back its married priests, it could increase its ranks by as much as
a quarter.

"The
priesthood is going downhill fairly fast," says Dean Hoge, a sociologist
and former priest at the Catholic University of America. "The crisis over
sexual misconduct only makes things a little worse." Hoge helped conduct a
1987 study that polled Catholic undergraduate students at Catholic schools
around the country. "We concluded that you would have a four-fold increase
in seminarians if you had optional celibacy. It's the biggest deterrent."

"There
is no shortage of priests," says Charles Ara. "They're not using the
priests they already have."

Only
about half of both homosexual and heterosexual
priests "in good standing" with the Church are actually practicing
celibacy, according to AW Richard Sipe, former priest and author of "Sex,
Priests and Power." Based on his surveys of priests, he estimates that at
any one time as many as 20 percent of priests are involved in ongoing sexual
relationships with adult women.

"This
sense that priests are set apart and above" Sipe says, "I think that
erects a structure for duplicity. This is why many priests who are still
priests lead double lives. They're good men, and they do good things, but they
have a woman in another town, or have affairs or relationships with a man ---
or in the worst cases, relationships with children --- that are contrary to what
they say and stand for in their official lives."

Priests who
marry, on the other hand, are priests who are unwilling to lie. "My
experience with priests who marry is a desire for honesty," Sipe says.
"They can't or won't lead a double life. They sacrifice the security of
the priesthood, their employment, their livelihood, status --- all of
that."

Most
married priests, especially those organized into groups pressing for reform
like CORPUS or Call to Action, are straightforward about who they are. Some are
uncomfortable with the idea of practicing, especially with the idea of charging
for services not recognized by the church. But many others are hungry for
reform. Several hundred are listed online in a regional database run by a group
called Celibacy Is the Issue (CITI) at "Rentapriest.com." That Web
site trumpets: "We married Roman Catholic Priest/couples invite you to
receive the Sacraments. COME AS YOU ARE!"

CITI was
founded by a laywoman named Louise Haggett, who was moved to action when she
couldn't find a priest to minister to her dying mother. "Mom never saw a
priest until she was practically comatose in the hospital," Haggett says.
"I felt so betrayed by the church."

"The
disciples were married men," she says. "If the Berlin wall came down,
why can't celibacy be abolished?"

Convinced
that married priests would solve the shortage, Haggett started a one-woman
campaign to restore credibility to married priests. By her own account, Haggett
has been succeeding. Hundreds of married priests across the country are
performing weddings and baptisms regularly, even stepping in to give mass if
the regular priest is not available. The Catholic system allows lay people to
carry out many parish duties, but only ordained priests can give the
sacraments.

"There
are 5300 parishes without a resident pastor," says Haggett. Married
priests, she says, are bound to fill those holes. "Canon 843: No priest
can refuse sacramental ministry to anyone who asks," Haggett recites.
"Canon 290: Once a priest, always a priest."

Not
everyone agrees with Haggett's analysis, or even with her numbers. "I'm
not denying it's a serious problem," says Mary Gautier, a senior research
associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, at Georgetown
University. "I just don't think there's a crisis."

Doing away
with celibacy, Gautier says, would not solve the problem. "The seminaries
would not fill up tomorrow with young men," she says. "It would have
some impact but it's a larger issue." She describes the larger issue as
"more of a generational thing." "Young people are not making
long-term commitments to anything," Gautier says. She admits, however,
that her belief is not based on any particular study, but on her perception of
young people today.

But most
sociologists agree that the Catholic Church is facing a crisis. Eight years
ago, Richard Schoener and Lawrence A. Young wrote, "At least among
Christians in this country, the paucity of pastors in contrast with the steady
growth in church membership is a crisis unique to Roman Catholicism."
Since that book "Full Pews, Empty Altars," was published, things have
only gotten worse.

CORPUS
is the oldest reform group in the country, organized
after the Second Vatican Council in 1974. "CORPUS is the only reform group
that's been in dialogue with so many hierarchies around the world," says
past president and active reformist Dr. Anthony Padovano. "They see us as
the representative of married priests. CORPUS tries to speak within the church
for change."

Still a
prominent Catholic, Padovano fits one of the most common profiles of married
Roman Catholic priests in America. He studied in Rome for six years, and was
ordained in 1960, just before the Second Vatican Council. The documents issued
by Vatican II marked an important sea change in Catholic attitudes. After
Vatican II, priests faced their audiences; they said mass in the language of
the people. Vatican II promised a more open Church, one more inclusive and
responsive to the laity.

"That
was the most moving gathering of God's people," Padovano remembers.
"I know most Catholics don't want to go back to the kind of church we were
before."

Padovano is
one of many priests who were ordained in the years surrounding Vatican II,
swept up in that era's hope and idealism. According to figures from the
Official Catholic Registry, the years between 1965 and 1975 showed a
significant uptick in the numbers of both priests and seminarians. Father
Charles Ara, in Cerritos, remembers sitting 100 feet away from Martin Luther
King Jr. during his "I have a dream" speech. Other married priests
tell stories of being arrested, or sprayed with water hoses, during those
tumultuous years.

The
priesthood was a perfectly logical choice for idealistic young men in the '60s.
The Catholic Church has a long history of advocating for the poor and the
victimized, from the Jesuits in the 18th century who stood up for the
indigenous Indians, to Maryknollpriests who stood up for the rights of
the Japanese-American community during the internment camps, to liberation theologians
in the 1970s.

Dr.
Padovano says that without a doubt, the married priests he knows come from that
legion of priests inspired by Vatican II and are deeply dedicated to ideals of
social justice.

The
eventual choice to leave the priesthood, for many of these men, was a wrenching
decision. "It's very difficult to leave something you love for reasons
that don't make sense to you," Padovano says. "In my years of working
with married priests, the harder it is for you to resign, the better your
marriage is going to be. That relationship must mean an enormous amount to you,
if you are willing to put on the line something that was your whole life. I
never, even for a second, regretted what I did. I never questioned it, never
thought what I did was wrong. But I was just... sorry, that I could not
continue my work, only because I wanted to marry a woman that I loved."

"That
was one of the more difficult things to try to understand," says Padovano, "why
marriage to a Catholic woman, to raise a Catholic family, would make me
ineligible to practice the priesthood fully, especially when Christ chose
married men to be his apostles."

Padovano
and his wife Theresa married in 1974. At the time, Theresa was a nun and a
graduate student in his class. "I'm still crazy about her, " he says.
"She's extraordinary. Thank God I didn't miss her. It would have been
sinful for me to walk away from her. I think she was really a gift."

Father
Joseph O'Rourke, who lives in Chicago, worked with the
peace movement in the '60s and was once arrested for burning Dow Chemical files
on the company's front lawn. He got into trouble with the church when he
baptized a baby whose 19-year-old mother had expressed her belief in
reproductive rights and family planning. The Church had refused the child
baptism, but O'Rourke stepped in and performed the ceremony on the steps of the
parish church.

"That
got me into a lot of trouble," he says. He was expelled from the Jesuit
order, before he chose to marry.

Says Russ
Ditzel of CORPUS: "My primary reason for transitioning was the lifestyle
we were required to live. It was so isolated. I found that it distanced me from
the people I was supposed to be serving. That was a period of time when we were
still trying to live out the expectations coming out of the Second Vatican
Council."

Robert
McClory, a former priest, journalism professor, and author of a book about
change and the Catholic Church says: "I left partly to get married, partly
because of dissatisfaction with the Church on issues like birth control. I
wasn't comfortable being the official proclaimer of doctrines that I couldn't
in good conscience ask people to follow."

For priests
like this, the desire to marry was just the final expression of larger
philosophical differences.

"There's
no real justification any longer for exclusive and autocratic government in the
Catholic Church," says O'Rourke, 62. O'Rourke couches the debate as a
fight for human rights against a paternalistic, patriarchal organization that
is wasting its potential as an important moral leader in society.

"The
Church could become the most powerful spokesperson for religious liberty, for
constitutional and human rights," he says. "You can find this in Catholic
social thought, in its advocacy of economic as well as political rights, that
we feel so strongly about."

It seems
clear that these men not only represent a sheer numerical loss for the Catholic
priesthood, but also a huge loss of talent, dedication, and faith. While the
Church may not yet have recognized that loss, many lay people have.

Paul
Lencioni, a 38-year-old developer for Cisco Systems, was married by O'Rourke
and had O'Rourke baptize both of his children.

It doesn't
bother Lencioni that O'Rourke no longer has the right, within the Church, to
perform these sacraments. "Celibacy is a dated concept," Lencioni
says. "It should be abolished."

In some
paradoxical way, married priests may be doing the Catholic Church a favor.
Married priests create a space that many Catholics trust, and feel is still
Catholic, outside of some of the Church's teachings. "We're the
sheepdogs," says O'Rourke.

Lencioni
articulates the kind of internal reconciliation that many Catholics have been
making for years. Many of the church's teachings, especially around personal
issues like birth control and divorce, have proved impossible for many modern
Catholics to live by.

"I
think it's OK to blend different philosophies in your own faith, and sometimes
we have to do that," Lencioni says. "Sometimes, when you make those
reconciliations, your faith is stronger. It's that, versus being unhappy with
your church and moving away from it. I don't think that, ultimately, is a
positive outcome."

"When
I see the church today, I see Masses that are poorly attended, I see people who
are disgruntled. A lot of that has to do with the need for some more open
thinking," says Lencioni.

On July 20,
Voice of the Faithful will gather the faithful from across the nation in an
attempt to move the Catholic Church closer to the more open vision of Vatican
II, toward its potential as a Church of the people. Married priests will
certainly be in attendance. It remains to be seen whether they will be heard.

To read more about married
priests and the Catholic Church, visit AlterNet.org at www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=35.