Halfway Houses for Clergy Dropouts

A Chopin Polonaise wafted out on a summer breeze from St. Anthony’s Seminary, hard by the sun-drenched adobe of California’s Queen of the Missions—Santa Bárbara. Inside the school, a Presbyterian minister sat at the piano playing his heart out.

“You hear that?” asked the Rev. John Wesley Downing, director of Professional Refocus Operation (PRO), as he pointed toward an open window in the Spanish mission-style building with wide porticoes and terra-cotta tile roof. “An hour ago he was sobbing like a baby and I held him in my arms and rocked him for thirty minutes.”

Downing, an Episcopal priest, explained that the Presbyterian brother—in transition to secular life—had finally “unloaded” in an emotion-packed encounter group that morning. Now, at the piano, he was releasing years of pent-up hostility, which had been aggravated by what Downing feels are the fulfillment-snubbing and guilt-producing strictures of the traditional church. “We are rebelling against systems that restrict and deny us what we feel and want,” he said.

PRO is part of a new program, spearheaded by former Episcopal bishop and “church alumnus” James A. Pike who now is president of the Santa Barbara-based Foundation for Religious Transition.Chairman of the FRT board of directors is the Rev. Stephen H. Fritchman, minister of the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. Foundation-sponsoring advisers include such liberal luminaries and clerical alumni as Toronto author Pierre Berton; Emory University religion professor Eugene Bianchi; William H. DuBay; Joseph Fletcher of Cambridge Episcopal Theological School; former priest James Kavanaugh of the La Jolla (California) Human Resources Institute; Michael Novak, dean of the Disciplines School at Oyster Bay, New York; and Bishop John A. T. Robinson, recently appointed dean of Cambridge University’s Trinity College. It is one of a number of agencies springing up across the nation dedicated to easing professional church people out of the institution and into secular life and employment. Leaders of such groups believe the psychological shock of transition requires “a turnaround time.”

In 1769, Father Junípero Serra led the Franciscan monks as they started construction of the chain of California missions from San Diego to Sonoma, “a day’s walk apart.” A major goal was to convert the Indians and gather them into institutional Roman Catholicism.

Ironically, 200 years later, the Franciscans fully support efforts to smooth the reverse flow out of the institutional cloister. FRT is paying nominal rent to use St. Anthony’s for a pilot class of twenty-five family units (forty-five persons) this summer. And the Rev. Armand Quiros, dean of the Franciscan School of Theology at Berkeley, is an instructor for the seventy-five-day summer project.

Perhaps St. Anthony’s involvement is in part an accommodation to the times. The school, a “minor” seminary preparing boys for the priesthood, normally enrolls 225. This fall, only fifty are expected.

The extent of the clerical brain drain is impossible to measure precisely. Priests, nuns, and ministers are dropping out by the thousands in what Pike calls “the Second Exodus.” Reliable estimates put the number of U.S. Catholic priests who have dropped out within the last year at at least 2,700. There was a decrease of 9,000 nuns in the same period. Protestant estimates are harder to come by, but authorities agree the exodus has increased dramatically in the last several years.

“Church alumni make up the fastest-growing religious movement in the country,” said Pike—who himself quit the church altogether last April—in an interview at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, overlooking the oilspattered Santa Barbara harbor. Pike, who until this month was one of eighteen senior fellows at the renowned “think tank,” has lived on the outer edge of orthodox Christian faith for years. Never short on ideas or the desire to disseminate them, he has the philosophy: If you see a movement coming, head it. Of church alumni he quipped: “Somebody has to be their bishop.”

But Pike and his shapely third wife, Diane, 30, take no salary as president and program coordinator of FRT, and Pike says he borrowed money to pay the first three months of Downing’s salary. PRO enrollees (the summer session includes several female Christian-education directors and a seminarian, along with the ministers and their families) pay at least $500 to attend, but Downing and Pike expect scholarship aid by fall. A PRO-arranged gardening service gives participants some employment.

Meanwhile, a hundred miles down coast on Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” in Los Angeles, another organization is striving to meet the leftover needs of institutional-church casualty cases. Robert Dease and Associates, an executive and middle-management counseling firm, several years ago got a contract from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to apply its counseling techniques to offenders about to be released into the community.

One day, Dease relates, he saw a news story about former priest William DuBay (who gained notoriety in his attempt to unionize Catholic priests) in which DuBay was quoted as saying that the move from the life of a cleric to the workaday world can be as great a trauma as the experience of an ex-con who is trying to make it on the outside.

Dease began offering counseling and employment leads for “the religious component” as well as for his convict, welfare recipient, Indian, and industry referrals. He recently formed Transition Resources, Incorporated (TRI), a non-profit agency managed solely by lay-professionals. There are no salaried personnel, but specialists help clerics in transition find housing, friends, medical, legal and financial advice, and community involvement.

Dease estimates that 1,000 clerical dropouts have been processed by TRI the last two years. After “psychological laicization” has been completed—usually in six months—clients earn an average of $10,000 to $12,000 a year, Dease said. A few make as much as $17,500 to $25,000 to start.

An ingenious phase of TRI uses ministerial misfits to help welfare recipients. Dease said the Missouri Synod Lutheran Wheat Ridge Foundation in Chicago has picked up $45,000 of an $85,000 model one-year project with the Los Angeles County social-service department to help indigent people become self-sustaining. Clergy who are going secular staff the program and gain new employment credentials and confidence themselves, Dease maintains.

Ministerial drop-outs are so inept in business skills that many can’t even fill out a job resume, according to PRO’s Downing.

In Washington, D. C., the Career Programming Institute offers group seminars on how to merchandise church-learned skills in the secular job market, using a re-employment strategy devised twenty years ago by management manpower consultant Bernard Haldane.

Then there is Bearings for Re-Establishment, Incorporated, a New York-based agency formed three years ago by an ex-priest to help others like him “get their bearings” in the outside world. Last year, Bearings served 2,100 clients, including Protestant ministers and a few rabbis. There is a branch office in Chicago, and volunteer representatives elsewhere cooperate with groups like TRI in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, capital of the dropout culture, former clergymen can get help from the Next Step, established nearly two years ago by a former nun.

In Santa Barbara, Downing is angry with the church, which he sees “going through its death throes” because it doesn’t provide vocational meaning. “The church is a very guilt-producing institution, more so probably than any other institution, including the family,” he contends, and he predicts that more than half of the nation’s 450,000 ministers and priests will opt out by 1975.

Capitalizing On Unrest

Christian students are demonstrating in the Philippines—some against the Roman Catholic hierarchy, others against Protestant missionaries’ “colonial mentality,” and still others against undue involvement of the churches in political matters.

It all began several months ago when hundreds of students picketed the palace of Rufino Cardinal Santos, the ranking Catholic in the Philippines. They issued a manifesto demanding an accounting of church properties and income, more involvement in social action, freer expression of diverse opinions within the church, and the resignation of Cardinal Santos. It was the first time such grievances had been so openly and fearlessly dramatized.

Not long after came rallies in several schools operated by ecumenical Protestant churches. Students denounced “colonialism,” demanded changes in their schools’ curricula, and asked for the resignation of at least one school director.

Then, taking a cue from the Catholic and Protestant students, some 5,000 youths from the nation’s most politically oriented church, the Iglesia ni Kristo, massed in front of their headquarters in Manila and demanded that the church stop meddling in political elections. Its tightly controlled 600,000 voters have been considered the winning difference in several of the recent national elections.

The result of all the demonstrating is a new sense of openness and willingness to allow intercommunication between generations. Conservative evangelical groups (who make up less than 1 per cent of the population) also see in the unrest an opportunity for developing new methods for presenting the Christian message.

NENE RAMIENTOS

NEWEST THING DOWN THE PIKE: CONSERVATISM?

The controversial former Episcopal bishop James A. Pike says he has grown soft on orthodox Christian theology, even though he recently dropped out of the church and now heads a foundation to minister to “church alumni.” His celebrated psychic experiences helped him be “more patient” with the “accretions of dogma built up around the person of Jesus,” the talkative onetime lawyer revealed in an interview on the sweeping veranda of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California.

“I have become more conservative on the veracity of attributing to Jesus what the gospel writers said he said,” Pike said, adding, however, that his belief in the resurrection rests on the Pauline account (and the “validation” of his communication with his dead son through medium Arthur Ford) rather than on the gospel accounts.

Pike is one of five scholars recently dropped from the Center. He took the dismissal (and loss of $25,000-a-year salary) in stride, saying he “would have been surprised” if he had been retained since he had but three years’ tenure and considered himself too much of an activist for the detached scholarly atmosphere Center president Robert Hutchins envisions for the institution after a general shake-up of personnel takes place this summer.

When pressed as to whether he considers himself a Christian, Pike replied he is not a Christian in the sense that “I don’t have an eschatological view of history.”

Being bumped from the Center made possible a smooth-as-silk transition to duties at his new Foundation for Religious Transition and a dizzying schedule of speaking engagements. Next month, he and his vivacious blond wife, Diane, will take a six-week trip to lower Iraq and Jerusalem to study “fossilized cultures” in a quest for the historical Jesus and an attempt to “make him live again in his own context.…”

“I’m really in love with him.… On the human level he is absolutely fabulous,” Pike said enthusiastically.

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