Author: William M. Shea

Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press

Published: 2015-10-07

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1681142120

The author, a practicing Roman Catholic, was confronted in 2002 with a leadership crisis in the church. Decades of horrendous clergy sexual abuse of children was accompanied by an even more momentous hierarchical betrayal in the cover-up of the crimes. The explosion in 2002 ended his naïveté and caused him to rework his understanding of the history and methods of hierarchy, and to think about the evils of clerical monarchy. The basic determinants of the current church crisis are, first, the sacred hierarchism of church structure and, second, the culture of clericalism that flows from it. The author argues that the church needs a thoroughly desacralized and demythologized leadership if Catholic clericalism is to be eliminated. The book also reflects on the lived Catholic life, contrasting the life of the priesthood and the life of marriage and family. The approach is at once narrative, historical-critical, and ecclesiological. It also offers a personal look at the author’s life as a Catholic for the past seventy years. The basic existential issue is “Why am I still a Catholic, and, indeed, why is anyone?” “…Powerful, absorbing memoir, by turns angry, funny, engaging and painfully candid… [Shea] offers radical proposals for reform, all turning on the notion that the core problem to be confronted is the gulf that separates clergy and laity, the long term result of a flimsy theological rationale which insists that the act of ordination itself marks an ‘ontological’ change in its recipients, making them company men of a special sort, fundamentally different from those they would help and teach, loyal mainly to guidance from above.” —Michael J. Lacey is coeditor, with Francis Oakley, and contributor to The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011) “Bill Shea has written a powerful and complex book about what Catholics so often write about: God, sex, authority and the Church. He writes autobiographically in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain as well as his The Sign of Jonas. He writes about the traumatic spiritual struggle with celibacy with which both Augustine and Merton were familiar. They chose to stay the course; Shea chose, after some twenty years, to find another spiritual path. That path was one opened up by marriage—a wife and two children—which finally gave him the spiritual peace he had been seeking. He writes of coming to the priesthood and leaving the priesthood for the lay Catholic life at a time of momentous historical transformation from the pre-Vatican II Church to the post-Vatican II Church. Even now we live with the struggle that exists between these two visions of the Church… So it is no accident that, like Augustine and Merton, Bill Shea finds God as a continuing presence, not at the end of his tale but in the twists and turns, the agonies and ecstasies, of his life journey.” —Darrell Fasching, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa