Religion: Ex-Priests on the Attack

Father James Kavanaugh, an angry priest who wrote a book bitterly attacking the Roman Catholic Church, last week announced that he is finally resigning from the priesthood and intends to get married. Coincidentally, British Theologian Charles Davis, an angry ex-priest who left the church and got married, has now written a book bitterly attacking Roman Catholicism.

Speaking to a student group at the University of Notre Dame, Father Kavanaugh, whose A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (TIME, July 7) has sold 140,000 copies, announced that he had submitted his resignation from the priesthood to his bishop, the Most Rev. Alexander Zaleski of Lansing. “I’m tired of beating my head against the wall,” Kavanaugh said, explaining that his resignation was a protest against the failure of bishops to enact the reforms proposed by the Second Vatican Council.

Kavanaugh poured out his scorn for canon law (“Dump it into the Tiber”), the Mass in English (which he called meaningless), and clerical celibacy. He admitted that he not only dates occasionally but also hopes eventually to marry. “I don’t know how I, as a man, can find God and meaning without a close personal relationship with a woman,” he said. Accused of being a trifle obsessed with sexual problems, Kavanaugh answered: “Everyone is hung up on sex.”

Credibility Issue. Ex-Priest Davis, by contrast, firmly insists that dissatisfaction with clerical celibacy had nothing to do with his leaving the church last December (TIME, Dec. 30). In a new book called A Question of Conscience (Harper & Row), Davis, 44, claims that his decision to defect was the result of his years of theological study, which gradually convinced him that Catholicism could not justify its claim to be the one true church of Christ and instead had become a “zone of untruth.”

Davis attacks Catholicism on two major points: it is not a credible representation of what Christ’s church ought to be, and its claim to be founded by Jesus through the Apostles cannot be justified historically. On the credibility issue Davis cites examples of the lack of freedom within the church, and its refusal to admit past error. Davis also argues that there is no convincing Scriptural basis for the institution of the papacy, and that the community of faith envisioned by Jesus was not the highly structured ecclesiastical bureaucracy that Rome is today but simply a loose-knit association of believers.

Go It Alone. Equally convinced that Catholicism today is hopelessly outmoded, both Kavanaugh and Davis agree, in essence, on how disaffected Catholics should face up to the situation. Kavanaugh, although he still considers himself a Catholic, believes basically that Christians should go it alone spiritually; what he wants is “freedom to find God without arrogant priests telling me I can’t.” More theologically, Davis proposes a state of “creative disaffiliation”— meaning committing oneself to Christ and Christian values but standing apart from any specific church. Both ex-priests intend to follow an independent path. Kavanaugh, who has technically been on leave from his diocese, will continue to serve as a marriage counselor at the nonsectarian Human Resources Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Davis is now a $16,000-a-year Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada.