Book review: “The Long Journey of a Cradle Catholic” and ex-priest

By John F. Kane
Denver Post - Hark
May 12, 2014

http://blogs.denverpost.com/hark/2014/03/20/priests/3006/#more-3006

Romanian Orthodox priests, assisted by gendarmes carrying burning torches on the sides, march with candles during a religious procession, in Bucharest, Romania, 08 March 2014. The procession, followed by hundreds of believers, is called ‘The Icon – A window to God’ and marks the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

A review of Lee Kaspari’s “The Long Journey of a Cradle Catholic: My Evolution from Admiration to Anguish and Back to Hope.” Caritas Communications, 2014.

This book is written by a Denver resident who has long been an “ex-priest.” But it could have been written by thousands of priests and ex-priests of his and my generation. Indeed, it speaks to the experience of most Catholics during the second half of the last century and the opening decades of this new one.

It speaks especially for the many good men who are or were “ordinary” Catholic priests – the men who, according to virtually every survey and analysis of contemporary Catholicism in the United States, have kept things going at the local level, even flourishing, despite so many missteps and even crimes by those up the hierarchical ladder.

It also speaks indirectly (except in one important closing chapter) of the many Catholic women, the sisters and their sisters (our mothers and aunts and sisters) who have probably been even more responsible for keeping things going and even flourishing.

And the book comes at a good time. For it recalls the initial enthusiasms and expectations in the Catholic world stirred by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and then the many disappointments as the still generally rule-bound hierarchy failed to comprehend and adequately respond to those expectations. As the hierarchy, especially during the long winter of John Paul II’s papacy (1978-2005) and that of his successor Benedict (2005-2013), forcefully blocked such expectation and turned against the council. Some Catholics, of course, were heartened by John Paul II, but most remained silent, and many left.

Yet Kaspari’s long journey comes at a moment of hope when Pope Francis represents a renewed embrace of the council’s vision. In many ways, there are two books here.

The first half is primarily an autobiographical narrative which evokes, through one man’s experience, the Catholic world of the 1950s and 1960s, when Kaspari felt the call to priestly ministry, gave himself to that life and then began to question its adequacy.

The rule of mandatory celibacy was central to that questioning, as this active young priest began to see (as did so many others) no serious incompatibility between the service of priestly ministry and the joys of family life. Yet perhaps even more central was his questioning of many rules that such a priest was asked to represent, and questioning the whole mind-set of living the gospel primarily through a tradition of rules.

So Kaspari left the priesthood but continued a life of ministry in work for indigenous people in Mexico that he had begun while a parish priest, in his career as a parole officer in Denver, and eventually by his efforts as a victim’s advocate for those violated by sexual abuse.

The second half jumps to the 1980s, 1990s and the first decades of the present century. While still autobiographical in tone, it becomes a series of chapters on key persons in the Archdiocese of Denver and key issues challenging Catholicism in Denver and worldwide.

There are chapters on Archbishops Francis Stafford (1986-96) and Charles Chaput (1997-2011) as well as chapters on two priest friends who chose different directions for their lives: Walter Nickless, now bishop of Sioux City Iowa, and Steve Handen, married and long known in Colorado Springs for his ministry to the homeless and the poor. Each of these chapters discusses the way bishops and priests have dealt with or failed to deal with the challenges of our times. The challenges themselves take center stage in several anguished chapters about the hierarchy’s failure to respond to the pedophilia crisis: “soul murder” and “cover-up” are the operative terms.

The book then concludes with two very hopeful chapters, one a wonderful defense of Catholic sisters in the US, the other a brief look at Pope Francis who has brought the author (and so many other Catholics) “back to hope,” as Kaspari’s subtitle puts it.

The book is an easy read, less the erudite language of the scholar than the direct and plain talk of a man who has spent his life as a Catholic priest active (to use Pope Francis’ image) in the streets of our world.

I say “spent his life as a priest” because while this book is about priests and their bishops, it is more fundamentally about the nature of the priesthood shared by all Christians, the ministry and service given by all who participate in the one priesthood of Christ.

It is a plea for official recognition by the Catholic Church of the priesthood of those who walk the streets of our cities and villages serving their sisters and brothers – whether they be women or men, married or celibate.

It is a plea for a Church that puts emphasis on such ministry rather than on rules (however needed) and on the power of management (however unavoidable). It is plea for the Church that Vatican II envisioned. And it often sounds more than a bit like the Church envisioned by Pope Francis’ great recent writing on “The Joy of the Gospel.”

(Kaspari’s “Long Journey” is available online through Amazon or in Denver at Gerken’s Religious Supplies, 1175 Santa Fe.)