Being ordained was a time of giddy celebration. I was vaunted as one of the celebrities of life. I remember actually the day after my ordination saying to Joan, my sister, “Gosh, I was at the centre of attention last night at the ordination and now I’ve got all this responsibility and all the hype is over.”
As a preist I was very privileged. Initially I was overwhelmed with being in a responsible position whereby people trusted me instinctively. It generated in me a deep feeling of, ‘I need to honour this responsibility,’ so I used to try hard to prepare for anything I did. I spent hours preparing anything to do with a sermon or liturgy, so much so that I used to spend sometimes until three in the morning preparing. Yes, I sued to burn the midnight oil a lot.
I was unhappy about the lifeless way some priests said mass. I didn’t think that the repetitive distributing on Holy Communion saying words that sounded like “By Carp, By Carp,” was the thing to do. There was a priest at school who was like a bumblebee in his expression of Mass. I used to find my own words and that took a long time. I was damn sure I wasn’t going to sell people short on any of my ideals.
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As time went by, my ideas diverged from those of the church and I found myself critiquing things: the church’s attitude towards homosexuality; the issues of sexuality outside of marriage; and of course the freedom of women in the church. So disenchantment grew.
There was dissonance between me and being an icon of the church, bing a priest. More and more my beliefs weren’t church beliefs at all. Over time the dissonance was too sharp and I couldn’t keep it together any longer, I felt I had to leave the active priesthood in the Catholic church which I did.
During all this time, in terms of sexuality, I was extremely immature. I didn’t have any sexual encounters before going into the seminary and certainly none during or after. Whenever I heard of such luminaries as monsignors misbehaving, I just couldn’t make sense of it. So my sensual drive was unexpressed. There were certainly no homosexual or heterosexual overtures – it was like an unknown area really. When I came to Auckland it was still that case and I was totally unknowing of what people’s reactions were to me. If there had been any sexual agenda behind their relating to me, I would not have been aware of it. It was totally of the radar. I didn’t have the language or the signals.
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I’m not anti the Church but I am grief-stricken that I can’t find a faith community that I feel comfortable with. I’ve been to different places from time to time, but they just don’t resonate with me,, so I don’t tend to go. My main concern is that my own kids don’t have a faith community to fall back on.
Read more excerpts from On a Mission by:
Tim Howard
Andrew Gunn
Dennis Farrelly
Merv Duffy
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