Thomas Christian and Raymond Monsour stood together in the sacristy of the St. Paul Cathedral 25 years ago, best friends holding unlit candles and waiting to be called to the altar where Archbishop Leo Binz would ordain them Roman Catholic priests.
During their six years at the St. Paul Seminary, the two young men had shared their dreams and aspirations of serving God for the rest of their lives.
Christian, then a 25-year-old product of a Richfield German Catholic family led by a police officer father, envisioned devoting his life as a chaplain to prison inmates.
“I wanted to work with them and make life a little easier, happier, for them,” Christian recalled.
Monsour, then 25 and the son of Lebanese immigrants who spoke mostly Arabic and lived on St. Paul’s West Side, wanted even at age 12 to spread the word of God to the African missions.
“It sounded fabulous going to Africa,” Monsour remembered.
But in less than six years, the two men’s shared dreams of priesthood came to an abrupt end when Christian left the ministry.
Today, Christian, 50, lives with his wife and three children near Albany, N.Y., far away from the priesthood of his younger days in the Twin Cities.
Monsour, also 50, did not make it to Africa, but he was a missionary in Venezuela. He is still a priest and serves as pastor of Ascension Church in Minneapolis, where he is known affectionately as “Father Ray.”
What happened to Christian and Monsour, in many ways, is what happened to the St. Paul Seminary class of 1963 and classes thereafter. Confronted by the turbulence and chaos of the 1960s, the young priests began to question their roles, and many left the ministry.
Of the 49 men ordained in 1963, for example, 18 have quit. The fact that a majority of the class remained priests is almost surprising, considering national statistics show that between 1960 and 1970 as many as 75 percent of the priests from some seminary classes eventually left the ministry.
The national trend continues today. Large classes like that of 1963 no longer graduate from the St. Paul Seminary. This year, only 12 were ordained.
But despite the different paths the members of the class of ’63 have taken in their lives, they have managed to stay in touch. Last month, these veterans of a changing Catholic Church and society got together for a few days at Lake Tahoe for their 25th reunion. It was a unique time to catch up on some old – and some new – dreams.
***
In 1963, the 49 men ordained in St. Paul were in their mid-20s and they shared the ideal of serving their church for a lifetime, a commitment reinforced on the peaceful seminary campus at Cretin and Summit avenues near the Mississippi River. They anticipated the routine, but challenging, parish life of a young Catholic priest.
“I think our vision of what the priesthood was going to be like was pretty much what it had been for years – just say Mass and hear lots of confessions and go visit sick people in the hospital and run the CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) program and the youth program and that was about it,” said Gary Meitz, a South Minneapolis native who went to De La Salle High School and Nazareth Hall pre-seminary before entering the St. Paul Seminary.
What the young priests found, however, was the turbulence of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, and a swirling controversy about major changes in the Catholic Church.
The members of the class of ’63 launched their ministries in an age when Americans fought over civil rights and among themselves at home, and lost their first war abroad; during a time when the church made dramatic changes because of the Second Vatican Council, and then watched its priests leave in droves.
They found themselves humbled by young couples who looked to them for advice about a married life they knew little about, or by the poor they could not help out of poverty, or by minorities who looked to them for answers to racism.
“You’re talking about the Vietnam War, you’re talking about protests,” recalled the Rev. Charles Froehle, a class member who now is rector of the St. Paul Seminary. “And there was a lot of unrest within the church generally about the direction of the Vatican Council. Some people were moving more rapidly than they should have, and there was an upheaval in religious education.”
The Second Vatican Council, which first met in 1962, was called by Pope John XXIII, who wanted bishops to write church reforms and to work for the unity of Christianity. Among other changes, it led to ecumenism and the closest contacts with Protestants since the Reformation, to the dropping of the Latin Mass and to more active participation by lay people.
“Lay people were told to just pray, pay and obey for years, and then they’re told, “You’re the church, you’re the people of God, get going, ” the Rev. Roger Pierre said. “Well, that doesn’t come easy when there has been a vacuum for a long time.”
That chaotic period in history challenged the young priests’ moral and spiritual beliefs more than ever before. And it led many to question their decision to become priests.
Pierre, a St. Paul native who shared the youthful enthusiasm of his classmates like Christian and Monsour, described what happened to his class this way: “Initially, when you left the seminary you had all the answers and all the wisdom, and all of a sudden it was blown to hell.”
Norbert Gernes, one of four men from the Winona Diocese who were members of the class of ’63, recalled the early years of his priesthood as a time when the blind obedience instilled in him in the seminary collided with the testiness of the social and religious movements of the 1960s. It was a time when parishioners wanted to come to grips with issues as explosive as birth control.
“The whole of society was going through a questioning of authority,” Gernes said.
He said many Catholics, for example, had blindly believed that all Catholics abstained from meat on Friday and that there were never any married priests. And yet, he said, many countries settled by Spain never observed the Friday abstinence and priests of the Maronite Eastern Rite Catholic Church were allowed to get married.
“It’s like suddenly, hey, all this stuff you told us, it ain’t necessarily so,” Gernes said.
And the education the class of ’63 received – excellent though it was in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, scripture, theology and history – did not prepare them for the world they found outside the seminary.
“It was ministry by the seat of your pants,” Pierre said. “It’s a wonder we’ve survived. I mean, if 3M or General Motors were running the show, they would have hauled us all back for a six-month to a year training program.”
Froehle remembered the tension, the unrest and the turmoil of the times, and said more and more priests questioned the church’s stand on celibacy.
“It was used far and wide by some to say that they never really thought through the question of celibacy as they were in the seminary, and they wanted to marry,” Froehle said.
Priests started to leave even though many found it difficult resigning from the institution that nurtured them for as much as 12 years in minor and major seminaries and all the years in the priesthood. Parents, brothers and sisters would not talk to some after they left the priesthood; others struggled to find a new line of work.
“They wanted to be priests very badly, but they also wanted a relationship and to get married very badly,” Christian said. “They paid a very heavy price.”
Christian was among the first to leave. A tough amateur boxer who won 28 of 31 Golden Gloves fights as a seminarian, he said he refused to disappear quietly like so many others had done. Instead, he arose after dinner at the class’ fifth reunion and announced he would be leaving.
“You could have heard a pin drop,” he said.
It was a reunion few of those who attended can forget. Meitz remembers a classmate kicking him under the table all the while Christian was talking.
“He didn’t want to hear it,” Meitz said. “It was almost traumatic because here was one of our clan that was leaving, the first one to leave. I mean, that was even before I thought about leaving.”
Meitz left the year after Christian gave his public goodbye speech.
Understandably, the men who stayed as priests found it difficult to see their good friends and classmates leave.
“There were some excellent people who left, and I was disappointed because I felt they were good priests. I would liked to have seen them continue to be active,” Froehle said. “I wasn’t angry at them, but I was disappointed that people who I thought could continue to serve the church well decided that they were going to serve in a different way.”
The priests who stayed and those who left do not deny there was tension between the two groups at first. At the class’ 10-year reunion, for example, Christian said some priests were visibly upset that former priests and their wives were invited. Those priests made it clear they would not attend future reunions if ex-priests would be present.
Meitz was told not to play handball at St. Paul Seminary after he left the priesthood because he would be a bad influence on seminarians. He said a lot of that animosity is gone today.
“I think the wounds have really healed,” he said. “They tell me there is only one guy left in our class that won’t come to a reunion because we’re going to be there.”
Meitz said this healing was evident last month when the class held its silver anniversary reunion at Lake Tahoe. Twenty-one priests and seven former priests mingled, reminisced and caught up with each other’s lives without any difficulty.
“It certainly was a change from the 10th reunion,” said Christian, who had not seen most of his classmates in 15 years.
“There’s no contest anymore,” Meitz said. “That’s all over. This time we were just a bunch of guys getting together.”
Froehle said class of ’63 members who have stayed priests for 25 years have shown how to lead during a critical time of change in the Catholic Church.
“I think they’ve done extremely well,” Froehle said. “I think that’s a group of people who believe deeply that the church is more than just a bunch of men, in terms of its priests. We’re not just a bunch of men who’ve done their jobs. We’re a group of men who believe in the role of the Spirit.”
Not that there were not some very trying times.
“I’d become very discouraged at times because of all the different pressures and changes and influences,” Pierre said. “And when you see some of your most valued friends leave, you wonder if you’re the dummy for staying.”
Monsour said he felt the same discouragement many times.
“But that’s what being a priest is about,” Monsour said. “Look at Christ. That’s the real challenge. You’ve got to stick it out, and when it works, it’s great.”
The class of ’63 is made up of bright and innovative men with doctoral and master’s degrees sprinkled liberally among them, and they have chalked up some enviable accomplishments.
They can point proudly to a classmate, the Most Rev. John Kinney who is now bishop of the diocese of Bismarck, N.D., and they can brag that one of their own, Froehle, is now rector of the place they all graduated from, the St. Paul Seminary. There also have been other rectors and Neumann Club chaplains among them, as well as heads of local and national groups of priests, authors, missionaries and of course, what they entered the seminary for, pastors.
“And a lot of those who have left have continued to make a positive contribution, to the church in some instances, and certainly society,” Froehle said.
And many classmates, like Christian and Monsour, remain close, refusing to let time and a difference in dreams tarnish their bonds.
“Hey,” Christian said, “Ray baptized two of my kids.”
***
Thomas Christian vividly remembers the years he spent as an assistant pastor in the Twin Cities in the 1960s, when his only companions late at night were Johnny Carson and a can of beer.
“I would come home after working morning, noon and night and watch TV, and then get up again the next morning for 6:30 Mass and start all over,” Christian said.
Not that he minded the work during a time in history when so many changes were happening in society and in the church.
“I enjoyed it,” he said of the priesthood, which he left in 1968.
A trained amateur boxer who still looks like he might be able to go a few rounds, Christian enthusiastically fought for the causes he believed in. For instance, he did not hesitate during his sermons in white suburban parishes to hold up hand-made signs that proclaimed in big black letters, “White Racism Must Go!”
He vigorously opposed the Vietnam War and during Mass he would pray both for Americans killed in action and for the Viet Cong who had died.
And he just as enthusiastically tried to bring comfort to prison inmates in Minnesota, hoping someday to have a prison ministry.
“I was always interested in criminal justice,” Christian explained. “My father was a police officer in Richfield for 30 years, but he was the type who rarely made an arrest. He wanted to help people. If a kid got into trouble, he would take the kid home and talk to the parents.”
Christian’s work with prisoners did not go unnoticed. In fact, the archbishop informed him that he was being considered for the chaplaincy at Stillwater prison.
“I said that would be exactly what I would want to do,” Christian recalled. “However, there’s one minor little thing. I said I felt celibacy should be optional.”
He argued that Protestant ministers and rabbis were working as hard or harder than he was, and they were married.
“I said I should be able to do that too,” Christian said.
He could not marry, and so he left the priesthood, but not before taking the unusual tack of getting up in front of his classmates during their fifth class reunion and announcing his intentions.
“Prior to my resigning, priests had resigned, but it was fairly limited, and then they resigned in the dark of the night. I was not going to do that,” Christian said. “I said I want to let everyone know what I’m going to be doing, so there are no secrets, no rumors.”
Christian, who recalled his past during his annual vacation at his lakeshore home in Avon, Minn., now lives near Albany, N.Y., with his wife, Bernice, a native of St. Paul, and their three children, Craig, 16, Andrew, 13, and Jennifer, 11.
He said he has never had second thoughts about what might have been.
“Some guys had a difficult time resigning,” he said. “I was more philosophical. I put in five, six years. It was a good experience. I moved on.”
And yet Christian has no doubt that his experiences since leaving the priesthood would make him a better priest today.
“I understand a lot more about what marriage is all about,” he said, noting that 19 years of marriage have given him a perspective he could never have had as a priest.
As a young priest, Christian remembers, he had to send young couples to other married couples to find out about marriage.
“And sexuality, we didn’t talk about sexuality,” he said. “I mean, how could I as a priest talk about sexuality with these people?”
His background in criminal justice and social science, including a doctorate in the field, also gives him much more to offer the priesthood today, he said.
“I’d be a much better preacher,” Christian said with a laugh. “I have more to say.”
But the former priest who gave up a prison chaplaincy in a way still has a ministry. He is the administrator for Community Dispute Resolution Centers in the state of New York. The centers are places to conciliate, mediate and arbitrate, and they are offered as alternatives to court.
“I’m still doing the same thing I did as a priest,” Christian said. “I mean I’m not preaching, but I’m working with people and helping them solve their own problems and helping them live a better life.”
And late at night, at the end of his work day, Christian no longer sits alone and drinks beer as he watches Johnny Carson on television.
***
The Rev. Raymond Monsour remembers only too well the time his best friend told him in 1968 that their shared dream of serving God for the rest of their lives as priests was going to end.
He had driven from St. Luke’s in St. Paul to Minnetonka, where Thomas Christian was an assistant pastor at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. Christian wanted his best friend to know first that he would be leaving the priesthood before he told the rest of his classmates at their fifth-year reunion.
“That was earthshaking,” recalled Monsour, who was an assistant at St. Luke’s. “I left about midnight and driving back, thinking about it, I started to ask, “Should I stay, or shouldn’t I stay? ”
Monsour knew he wanted very badly to be a priest, but the questions came anyway. And he wondered if the idea of priesthood for himself was still there.
After all, Monsour had been subjected to the same pressures and changes in society and the Catholic Church that Christian had faced. In fact, Monsour had seen President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” up close.
“I was on the West Side down by the flats and in West Seventh.” Monsour said. “But the poor had no power to do anything.”
He remembered that when the plan to build Interstate 35 through the West Seventh Street neighborhood was approved, St. James parish lost about 200 families.
“The people said, “You can’t condemn our houses.’ But the government said, “Too bad, you lost it, you’re going to move, ” Monsour said. “Nationally, the federal government had a “War on Poverty,’and yet when it came to poverty, poverty had nothing to say about it. They showed no respect for the people there.”
Then, in 1970, Monsour went to South America as pastor of a mission to San Felix and Puerto Ordaz, twin cities for iron miners in southeastern Venezuela, and he came face to face with even more poverty.
He said living in Venezuela until 1974 taught him to take a good look at the needs of the poor.
“They don’t want to be poor, but they’re there,” Monsour said. “It’s easy to condemn the poor and say that’s why they’re bad. But there are just as many good people among the poor.”
The work of a priest has tested Monsour’s will over the years, but in spite of Christian’s decision to leave, he decided to stay.
“I stayed because I felt I was a good priest,” Monsour said. “I thought I could still do what I wanted. I wasn’t ready for saying I wanted to get married. So I said what was the difference. I could still do the work I was doing, even though I was getting frustrated with some things.”
Christian left the priesthood because he wanted to get married, while Monsour, who originally belonged to the Maronite Eastern Rite Catholic Church, could have been a married priest.
“Being married was not such a pressing need,” Monsour said. “It was good I wasn’t. I could go where I did and do what I did. It gave me more freedom. I don’t know if I could have handled a family and a parish, especially moving down to Latin America.”
Monsour, who was pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in his old neighborhood on the West Side of St. Paul and now holds the same position at Ascension Church in Minneapolis, has always insisted that as a priest he is only trying to get the Gospel’s message of peace, justice and love out to the people.
“There are barriers of color, nationalities and money,” Monsour admitted. “But you try to break down the barriers.”
He said he does this by treating people as individuals.
“Can you go to them honestly, sit down with them at times of joy and sorrow, and support them when they really need you?” he asked.
Still, Monsour is the first to point out that he is not always successful in his efforts.
“Some people you work a lot with, and all the work goes down the drain,” Monsour said. “But you’ve got to accept that. They’re not ready or you’re not the right person to work with them.”
Besides, he says, nobody is perfect.
“I make mistakes,” Monsour said. “People say I’m trying to play God. I don’t. I’m trying to be honest. I’m not God. All I can do is accept what people tell me.”
And he has been doing that as a priest for a quarter of a century.
***
Norbert Gernes, 50, looks like he still could dart in and out of traffic on a motorcycle, with his black Labrador riding on the seat behind him, just like he did in his younger days in the Winona Diocese, where he served in Rochester, Owatonna and Claremont.
But these days he wouldn’t be doing it to get to church in time to celebrate Mass. Back in the 1960s, he was a young priest popular with parishioners who came from miles around to attend his Mass.
“I think the people came because I was someone who, when I preached, I preached about what I believed,” he said.
Gernes left the priesthood in 1973. Today he is in charge of admissions and security at the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center near the shadow of the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Two heavy security doors keep his office area separated from the general public.
“It’s a good place to work,” said Gernes, who carries a walkie-talkie like the ones used by police officers. “It’s very different work here.”
His job involves a lot of what he calls busy work, such as making sure there is a deputy to transfer a juvenile, or deciding what is a legitimate visitor’s request to see an inmate.
It is not the kind of job that earned him the reputation as a rebel priest during the 1960s.
“The word sort of passed that I was this wild-eyed radical priest who wasn’t taking care of the parish and was probably using pizza for communion,” he said. “The reputation that spread among the other clergy was that I wasn’t administering the sacraments.”
But Gernes contends he had a very conservative liturgy, and that his parishioners made the old stations of the cross before Mass and said the rosary.
“People came because I was saying something, and I was doing something,” Gernes said.
One of the things he did was arrange what he remembered as the first church-sanctioned marriage of a Catholic in a Protestant church.
“I got a lot of hatred from other priests for that kind of thing because they thought I was betraying the church,” Gernes said.
He also got in trouble with the Catholic hierarchy when he told his bishop to present a position paper to the National Conference of Bishops stating parishioners wanted the church to deal with the issues of birth control and married clergy.
“He blew his stack,” Gernes recalled. “He said, “I don’t know how anybody could accept any pastoral position in the church and not accept everything Rome says.’ And I said, “Do you believe everything Rome says?’ He wouldn’t answer.”
But what triggered his exit from the priesthood occurred after he was named head of the Regional Christian Education Office in Claremont. He organized a spaghetti dinner in an attempt to build bridges with priests who had feuded with him almost from the day he started in the Winona Diocese in 1963.
Twelve priests accepted the dinner invitation, but Gernes never got a chance to break bread with his colleagues.
“Nobody showed up,” he said, speaking softly as tears welled up in his eyes. “I ate by myself, and you can see that one still hurts.”
Gernes dried his eyes with a handkerchief and apologized for the interruption.
“I guess it was at that point, that’s where I saw I couldn’t survive as a priest anymore,” he continued. “I had always believed that if I could change the church, but keep my integrity and not sell out, that that would win out. But I got where I just could not survive alone anymore.”
Gernes married three months after he left the priesthood, but he insists he did not leave to get married.
“I hardly say that anymore because most people don’t want to believe it anyway,” he said. “But I left because I could not live within the church structure anymore.”
Today, he and his wife, Patricia, and their four children, ages 7 to 14, live in Eden Prairie. Gernes, who has a master’s degree in counseling, served one term on the Eden Prairie school board and two terms on the Hennepin Technical Center board. He also wrote a book, “A View from the Mist,” where he makes suggestions he says are needed to bring the church into the 20th century.
Still, the Catholic Church remains a part of his life. All the Gernes children, for example, have been raised Catholic. And Gernes occasionally attends Mass.
“When we registered at the church, they sent out a packet of materials, and one of the questions on it was, `What is your occupation?'” Gernes said. “I put down, `Catholic priest waiting for the church to wake up.'”
***
An insurance executive 25 years ago who spotted Thomas Hunstiger’s knack for selling could have predicted the young man some day would be sitting in a spacious office behind an enormous business desk, successfully directing his own sales operation.
That prediction would have been on target.
Hunstiger today can be found in an office that easily accommodates a gigantic desk along Randolph Avenue in St. Paul where he is pastor at Holy Spirit Catholic Church.
And he is still selling.
“When people ask me about some of the teachings of the church, I always love to say I’m in sales, not management,” Hunstiger said.
His career in selling started during his St. Paul Seminary days when he spent summers peddling life insurance on straight commission to farmers in North Dakota.
“I ended up making more money in three months than I would make all year as a priest,” he said with a chuckle. “I got a very lucrative job offer.”
But the church had a better offer.
“I really wanted the priesthood as a way of serving people, be part of people’s life in a special way and be able to give my life to God in this way,” Hunstiger said. “I knew I could make money if I wanted to, but money wasn’t the main goal in my life.”
And the priesthood remained the main goal in Hunstiger’s life even as he experienced the turmoil of the 1960s and saw some of his classmates leave the ministry.
“Obviously, you have questions, and you experience some pain because I had some good friends leave the ministry,” he said. “You had to take a look at your own life, your own ministry, and just realizing it takes a lot of commitment.”
Hunstiger believes that the turbulence of the times helped make him a better priest.
“The changes made me who I am now,” he said. “I’ve always been able to adapt. Maybe that selling job in North Dakota paid off. You have to take people where they’re at, then move them along.”
Hunstiger always used his selling talents wherever he served as a priest in the Twin Cities. As an assistant, for example, his pastors generally were older priests who had to be sold on the changes brought on by the Second Vatican Council. At St. Austin’s in Minneapolis in the 1960s, his pastor still told parishioners it was against church law to join the YMCA.
“And here I was trying to promote ecumenism,” Hunstiger said.
But promote ecumenism he did. He brought together a large group of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers for an anniversary of the Reformation, and he invited a black Baptist minister to preach at a Martin Luther King memorial service. Both times he was not sure how his pastor would react.
“But God bless him, he was able to give in to some of that,” Hunstiger said. “But that was a revolution, when you think of changing the whole attitude.”
Hunstiger saw that revolution from a different perspective when he was asked to become pastor at St. Stephen’s in Minneapolis in 1970.
“When I was sent there, they had to get someone young, energetic and somewhat foolish because there were just enormous problems there,” he recalled.
A former wealthy white parish, St. Stephen’s had a congregation of white, Indian and black parishioners. It had tried a team ministry with three priests, but that collapsed and all three priests left the ministry.
Hunstiger found himself walking into his first pastorship, and he was not welcomed with open arms. There even was an underground newspaper that wanted a church the way it was before Vatican II, including keeping the Latin Mass.
“I used the philosophy that has taken me through since the early days,” Hunstiger said. “I said, “Lord, you got me into this, you take over. ”
Hunstiger was able to get his parishioners working with people in the community who were attracted to St. Stephen’s because of inner-city programs, such as one for the retarded set up by Hunstiger’s predecessors.
He did not get everybody in the parish on his side, he admits, but he managed to turn it around and pay the bills.
“I felt a lot of disappointments and setbacks, but again I had support from a number of parishioners and I always had my friends to surround me,” he said.
Today, Hunstiger – who later served as pastor at a suburban parish in Minnetonka and at a rural parish in Faribault before returning to the city at Holy Spirit – said he would not be able to handle a parish like the St. Stephen’s of 1970.
“I was just young then,” he said. “But you don’t have that type of thing happening in today’s church either. Back then it was just a climate of confrontation.”
***
Gary Meitz was interrupted a number of times by the telephone and knocks on the door of his small office as he tried to recall a period in his life when he was a priest of the Catholic Church.
These days he works in a different kind of cathedral in downtown Minneapolis called the Hennepin County Government Center.
Meitz, 51, a soft-spoken man, was very patient handling the interruptions, promising to get back to callers with the information they wanted.
But then, he is the same way at cocktail parties when the word gets around that he is an ex-priest and some guests immediately want to know why he left. He has patiently come up with a standard line.
“I’ll say, I met this gorgeous woman, and I couldn’t resist, so I left,” he said. “We laugh.”
But the real reason Meitz left the ministry in 1969 after six years in the St. Paul Archdiocese boils down to one word – independence.
“Every guy I’ve talked to has said it in a different way, but they’ve always said, “I want to be on my own, ” he said. “You see, as a priest, you’re not. One guy told me one day, “I want to put my feet under my own table.’ That capsulizes it right there.”
Today, Meitz has a job that allows him to do just that. He supervises 12 probation officers who handle misdemeanors in the Hennepin County District Court. About 80 percent of their business is drunken driving, although they also deal with shoplifting, petty theft, prostitution, domestic assaults and bad checks.
“I love it,” said Meitz, who has a master’s degree in social work. “It’s a good fit because first of all, I’m a helping person, and there is so much to be done. Recently, with the murders and the rapes in the parking lots, somebody has got to be out there keeping people in line.”
Then, at the end of a full day at work, Meitz can go home to South Minneapolis to his wife, Ruth, and their daughters Anne, 16, and Amy, 15, and his boss has nothing to say about what he does.
“After 4:30, I can do anything I please,” he said. “As a priest, you can’t do that. The archbishop is still in charge of you.”
But it was not easy getting to where Meitz is today.
“It was horrible,” he recalled. “You don’t know how to find a job, you don’t know how to find your way.”
Meitz got help finding work a St. Paul Seminary classmate Thomas Christian, who left the priesthood a year before he did and was then a probation officer in Hennepin County. After that, Meitz decided to help others make the drastic change, and he eventually founded a program called Transition, which started helping Catholic priests find jobs and today also helps nuns and ministers of other religions.
“I think the church ought to be doing more for guys who leave, and there are individuals within the church that feel that way,” Meitz said. “But officially they don’t, because it looks like they would be sponsoring leaving. But a lot of guys do have a real tough time. In particular, some guys need therapy and all kinds of things and can’t afford it.”
There are, of course, personal and emotional issues, such as telling parents about the decision to leave the ministry. Meitz’s parents were dead when he resigned, but he has counseled many others who have had to face this tough issue.
“It’s real hard,” he said. “You have a mother who is 80 years old, and then all of a sudden she’s saying the rosary and then you’ve got to go tell her that you’re leaving the priesthood. That’s painful stuff, and she’s not going to understand it.”
And there are the practical issues.
“Some priests have asked me what I was going to do about food and how I could cook my own meals,” Meitz said. “I had to walk into a Target store and buy a wastebasket and a broom and a vacuum cleaner and I smelled the popcorn. This was when Targets first opened up. The lights were oppressive and I heard babies crying and I said, “What am I doing here?’ I’d never been in a Target store, ever, and I was 31 years old.”
But Meitz has found it very satisfying helping former priests find jobs and adjust to the world outside their church.
“You’re working with some guy who’s going through a lot of trauma, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a lot of skills, a lot of energy and a lot of drive,” he said. “A lot of guys sort of have a kind of a down period when they first leave, but then as soon as they pull out of that, they accomplish a lot.”
Not the least of which is to find their own table to put their feet under.
***
The parish where the Rev. Roger Pierre now preaches the word of God really isn’t that far from the St. Paul Seminary campus where he was trained to do his work.
It just seems that way, in more ways than one.
Pierre is pastor at St. Bartholomew in Wayzata, and to get there from St. Paul this past summer meant driving through miles of noisy construction on U.S. Highway 12, where bulldozers were widening roads so more cars can go bumper-to-bumper during rush hour.
Pierre, who is 51, also has traveled a long way since he left the seminary 25 years ago eager and ready to tackle the world by himself.
“When you left the seminary, you were on your own,” recalled Pierre, a native of St. Paul who went to Cretin High School and Nazareth Hall before entering the St. Paul Seminary.
“You were supposed to be all things to all people and kind of be the guru and the savior. You left with the sense of you were touched by Christ and you were now to go out and give Christ to people, but you were doing that in kind of an isolated manner, like the Lone Ranger.”
That changed when the Vatican Council II called for a renewal of the church and the priesthood.
Today Pierre, who has served at five parishes and only recently was called upon to provide leadership at St. Bartholomew’s, no longer feels like the Lone Ranger.
“You now see ministry and priesthood much more in collaboration and shared ministry,” Pierre said. “For me, that’s a significant shift, where priesthood was 25 years ago and where it is today. I mean, I think we’re in a much healthier position.”
In the past, there were cliques of priests, sometimes pitting the newly ordained versus the older pastors, but today there are priest support groups and the priest senate.
“I belong to a support group and it has been very significant for my growth and my healing and my staying power in the priesthood,” Pierre said.
He also points to gatherings at Collegeville and continuing education programs where priests review the status of their calling and talk about issues such as human sexuality, stress, preaching and the changing role of being a pastor.
“Priests need priests,” Pierre said. “Priests need to talk to one another. Priests need to let down their hair. They have to deal with issues such as the changes in the church, or personal issues like the whole mid-life crisis and what does it mean for a male celibate.”
Priests today also have the opportunity to take sabbaticals, and five years ago Pierre took three months to review his 20 years of priesthood and to get in touch with his adult life.
“That was a real breath of fresh air for me,” he said. “I took some time for prayer and spiritual nourishment and recharging of my batteries.”
In his younger days, of course, Pierre didn’t consider such needs. He even survived the culture shock of being transplanted right out of the seminary to Immaculate Conception in Faribault, where he also was chaplain of the state hospitals. Pierre found himself having to preach to the hearing impaired, the blind and the mentally retarded.
“When you were trained to be a theologian and you have to deal with kids who are retarded and parents, you learn to get street smart in a hurry,” he said. “But in your youth, you’ve got you’re vim, vigor and vitality, and there’s a lot of ego in the whole thing.”
These days, Pierre said the ego is gone, replaced instead by spirit.
“Now I realize more than ever in my life that life is partnership with your God,” he said. “I really follow a spirituality program for my own personal life to continue on to have the energy to be the pastor that I’m supposed to be.”
Pierre figures he will go another 10 or 15 years as a senior pastor, but after that he would like to spend his energies to be more of a prayer partner, perhaps doing retreat work with priests and lay people and helping them get in touch with their own personal journeys.
“We’ve got to make room for the new blood, and I think there are too many old guys hanging on,” Pierre said. “You can’t be an old goat sucking on your pipe.”
***
It should be no surprise to find William “Butch” Ryan, 52, who left the priesthood in 1976, settled in quiet and peaceful rural America, amid the rolling hills of western Wisconsin.
Even his business, William’s Realty, where he handles real estate, mortgages and financial services, is a block off the main street of Amery, Wis., away from whatever bothersome traffic goes through small towns.
Ryan never liked the limelight when he was an assistant pastor in the Twin Cities at a time when the Catholic Church was subjected to a lot of scrutiny.
“I’m not a cause guy in the sense that I wouldn’t be in a sit-in someplace, I wouldn’t be out parading. I just kind of quietly in my own corner do what needs to be done,” he said.
“We need both, but that’s not my constitution. One guy is going to get the publicity that forces change, the other guy is going to bring it about from the inside out. That’s where I was at.”
Ryan lives with his wife, Kathy, about a mile out of town on 27 acres where he has planted thousands of trees since he left St. Thomas Aquinas parish in St. Paul Park. He and Kathy have five children.
“Kathy was widowed and came with four kids,” Ryan said. “So I got a wife and four kids in the deal, plus one later on.”
The irony is that this man who never wanted any publicity ended up in his out-of-the-way Wisconsin haven after he gained all sorts of notoriety for being featured in a story, complete with pictures, in a conservative Catholic newspaper, the Wanderer.
Ryan recalled that it was during the early part of the women’s movement when some women in the parish were trying to decide what they wanted to do with their lives, and they wanted him to have an informal Mass with a liturgy to match.
“I said, well yeah, that’s my thing, reaching them where they’re at in the way that they could respond,” he said.
So the Mass was set up in the school library for the women and their children, with a theme about a little kid who loves a stuffed rabbit so much it becomes real. Ryan didn’t wear his vestments, the altar was just a table with a tablecloth, and the whole affair was fairly unstructured.
“Things were loosening up a bit and I probably loosened it a whole lot farther than the regulations,” Ryan said.
Little did he know that some women who didn’t approve of what was going on attended one of the services and took photographs, which soon appeared in the Wanderer.
“They used this as an opportunity to get to the bishop and say, “See what you’re allowing. When are you going to clamp down? ” he said. “I became their tool. They sent a copy of this thing to every bishop in the country.”
Ryan was called in by his archbishop and told he had to keep the rules. It was after that meeting that Ryan started to think about leaving the priesthood.
“God, I was naive,” he said. “I really thought the bishop and I were in the same church, working for the same church. I came out of the chancery shaking my head and saying, there’s no way he can understand what I am saying, and I can’t understand what he’s saying.”
Ryan argued that the Mass was a celebration within the context of a meal, and sometimes it should be a formal banquet and sometimes it should be a snack.
“I think when you sit down with a bunch of mothers and kids in a library, maybe you don’t need to have a tuxedo on,” he said.
Still, he agonized for more than two years before leaving the ministry.
“I was 40 years old, you know, and I had to start all over again,” he said. “But I thought, “Leave while you’re happy and while the people are happy, and start a new life. Be glad for the 13 years you had. Now let’s find 13 years of something else. ”
Ryan has found that something else in real estate and financial services. He sees his personal service to people as a continuation of what he did as a priest, and in some cases, he thinks it is even more basic than before.
“As a priest, you can deal only so much with people whose troubles come from the fact that they’re broke, and because they’re broke they do awful things to each other,” he said. “I can deal with people’s economics.”
***
The Rev. Charles Froehle looked comfortable and very much at home in his office on the campus of the St. Paul Seminary off Cretin Avenue.
But then, the seminary has been his home for most of his adult life. In fact, he still lives in the student dormitory where he stayed with the class of ’63.
“Many of my classmates live alone and do not have the kind of community experience of priesthood that I do,” said Froehle, who became rector of his alma mater in 1980. “I’ve enjoyed the companionship of really good priests, highly motivated, good, good people, and that has been an extraordinary experience for me.”
He never planned it that way. Froehle, 51, who grew up across the street from St. Matthew’s parish in St. Paul, was counting on becoming a pastor someday, the same as his classmates.
But two years after he was ordained, he was told by the archbishop that someone would be needed to teach at the St. Paul Seminary, and if he was interested, he would be the one sent to Rome for advanced study.
“When I said yes to that, I knew I was saying yes to a whole non-parochial future,” he said. “I was excited about the possibility of studying in Rome, but I knew that it meant teaching.”
Froehle began his doctoral studies in theology in Rome in 1965 at the University of St. Thomas, a Dominican university popularly known as the Angelicum, and he lived at the graduate house of the North American College.
He was in Rome during the last session of the historic Vatican Council II, and he felt the winds of change almost immediately. Even the cassock every priest wore in public would be affected.
“When I started there you had to wear a long cassock on the street. You rarely would wear a suit,” he recalled. “By the time I left, that had all changed. We were wearing suits.”
Froehle returned to teach a course on the Eucharist at the St. Paul Seminary in 1968, the very year when the 1960s was coming to a boil.
“There was a lot of unrest, and the Vietnam thing was the source of a lot of tension,” he said. “There were a lot of protests going on.”
It also was the year the Catholic Church reaffirmed its teaching against birth control, and Froehle remembered that a lot of Catholics were upset about that.
“They didn’t see the wisdom of it,” he said.
At the St. Paul Seminary, Froehle found the students asking for more freedom and responsibility in their lives. It was the beginning of some real changes in seminary life, when it moved from the closed system that Froehle and his classmates were trained under, to the open system that exists today.
During his days as a seminarian, for example, Froehle had to be on campus almost all the time. After Froehle returned as a teacher, students gradually were allowed to start going out; now they have certain responsibilities on campus, but they have to govern their own time.
“That change didn’t take place suddenly or easily, because it was turning from a system that had been in place for a long time,” Froehle said. The rule book that the class of 1963 followed, for instance, was the same rule book that had been followed probably for 25 years before that.
“We are a very different seminary today from what we were when I joined the faculty,” Froehle said. “And that has been a gradual but not easy process of change.”
Still, he said this doesn’t mean that it is now easier for the seminarian. In fact, Froehle said a young priest these days has a lot more responsibility placed on his shoulders right away. He explained that while his classmates might have started out as second or even third assistants, today’s young priest is immediately the second priest.
“I think we were kind of eased into parish life a bit more than the priest of today is,” he said of the class of 1963. “We worked hard, but I think it’s harder for a guy to start out today than it was for us.”
Froehle likes living on the campus where it all started for him and the class of 1963, where he can be with the priests of tomorrow who want to give their lives to the church.
“I like living with these people, and I like having a role in this community,” Froehle said.
Twenty-five years from today, of course, Froehle and many of his classmates will be the retired priests, and current seminarians will be leading the church.
“That’s why I like being with them now. I like to see what kind of people they are. I like to help them to become better than they are,” Froehle said. “And that gives me a lot of hope in the future because they are extraordinary people.”
Not unlike the St. Paul Seminary class of 1963.
