Roman Catholics: A Theologian Defects

The Rev. Charles Davis is England’s leading Roman Catholic theologian. A peritus (expert) at the Second Vatican Council, he has been editor of the Clergy Review, a provocative intellectual monthly aimed at priests, professor of theology at Jesuit-run Heythrop College, Oxfordshire, and has written several well-reviewed theological tomes. Understandably, England’s Catholics were shocked last week when Father Davis announced that after 20 years as a priest he was leaving the church. Compounding the shock, Davis, 43, also said that he intended to marry an American Catholic, Florence Henderson, 36, of Farmingdale, N.Y., a theology student at Bristol University. She, too, plans to leave the church.

Davis explained that he still considers himself a Christian, although he has no plans to affiliate with any other church. As for Catholicism, he declared: “I do not think that the claim the church makes as an institution rests upon any adequate Biblical and historical basis. I don’t believe that the church is absolute, and I don’t believe any more in papal infallibility. There is concern for authority at the expense of truth, as I am constantly shown by instances of the damage to persons by the workings of an impersonal and unfree system.”

Rebuilding a Life. Davis insists that his forthcoming marriage to Miss Henderson has nothing to do with his leaving the church. “I am marrying,” he said, “to rebuild my life upon a personal love I can recognize as true and real, after a life surrounded in the church by so much that is, at best, irrelevant and at worst an obstacle to genuine human experience.”

Initially, Davis’ Catholic friends were too stunned to respond to the news, although Rosemary Haughton, a housewife and lay theologian, wrote to the Guardian that his defection “is a staggering blow to the whole church.” Guardian Columnist Geoffrey Moorhouse also saw it in those terms. “For Catholicism,” he wrote, “it is a blow as bitter as the one Anglicans sustained 100 years ago when John Henry Newman departed for Rome.” Davis’ friend and superior, John Cardinal Heenan of Westminster, said only that he would pray “that God will guide him in all his undertakings.”

Steady Erosion. Not many priests leave the church as dramatically as did Father Davis, but Catholicism unquestionably is suffering a small but steady erosion of its clerical ranks. A major cause of defection — and of restlessness among priests who prefer to stay within the church — is the question of celibacy. Even though Pope Paul has made it clear that he will maintain the rule of wifeless priests, a surprisingly large number of clerics think that some modification is in order. This month Kansas City’s enterprising National Catholic Reporter published a survey of 3,000 U.S. diocesan priests, conducted by Jesuit Sociologist Joseph Fichter of Harvard. His finding: 62% of the clergy believed that priests should have the choice of marriage or celibacy; 31% might marry if the church would allow it.