The Mission : Former Jesuit Priest Has a Dream: He Wants the Catholic Church to Embrace Married Clerics--Both Male and Female

A framed photo of the happy couple on their wedding day stands on a living room table, the bride in a traditional white gown, the groom in a tux. They live in a cozy house with a white picket fence, flowers and a big dog.

The wife serves coffee and cheerfully disappears. The husband starts to recall the events that led him to leave the Jesuits in 1986, marry and become suspended from the priesthood in 1987 and write a book questioning the Roman Catholic Church and its laws regarding the priesthood.

He still calls himself Father Terry Sweeney, a believing Catholic and a priest actively engaged in ministry. On occasion, he wears clerical garb.

About his relationship with the church, Sweeney says, “As far as I’m concerned, officially the doors are closed to me. But my heart is not closed to it.”

In fact, as he tells it, his ministry is to the church: He wants to help change it in order to save it. Unlike many who have left the priesthood, often to marry, and turned their backs on the past, Sweeney will not let go of it. This has not been a clean break. His relationship to the church and the priesthood are, in fact, what his life is about.

“I have a sense of love and responsibility to the church,” he says, “as a priest, as a married priest, as a Christian. I have an ongoing responsibility to inform the church.”

Sweeney makes an important distinction here: There is the institutional church, administered out of the Vatican--which he calls a sacerdotal, or priestly, monarchy--and there is the church as the people of God. He counts himself among the latter and does not recognize the authority of the former as it is structured. His mission is to change that structure.

As a Jesuit, much of Sweeney’s job involved television writing and production; he has continued with this and describes several television and film projects in various stages of completion. Plus, he has a book in the works on date rape. For some, this would be a full career, but it plays a secondary role in his life. Sweeney simply calls it his work--as opposed to his mission.

Out of that mission, he says, came “A Church Divided: The Vatican vs. American Catholics,” published this month by Prometheus Books, as did another book he and his wife, actress Pamela Shoop, have just completed. In the former, Sweeney explores church authority and the priesthood, especially regarding celibacy and the ordination of women. In the latter, “What God Hath Joined,” he and Shoop write alternating chapters telling their story.

Besides leading him to writing, Sweeney’s mission involves him, with his wife, in two groups: Good Tidings, a national organization “for priests and women in love” that counsels such couples and helps them reach decisions, and CORPUS, an acronym for Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service, an organization of 11,000 members, many of them married priests. CORPUS’s goal, he says, is to return to a ministry that has both celibate and married male and female priests.

“I would like to be a diocesan priest (as opposed to being a member of a religious order like the Jesuits) if the authoritarian structure of the church changes,” he says. “I would love to minister, but I would in no way act as if the executive authority of the church depends on one bishop, or Pope, making the decisions. Authority flows from the community.”

Father Terrance Sweeney, S.J., caused a national uproar in 1986 when he refused a Jesuit order to destroy all data and “cease and desist” work on his survey of American bishops regarding their attitudes toward celibacy and women’s ordination.

The survey, he says, was intended to complement seven years of personal research on authority, obedience, celibacy and women priests. And that research had been prompted by Sweeney’s hesitation to take his final solemn vows as a Jesuit in 1978.

A native Angeleno, Terry Sweeney graduated from Loyola High School and entered the Jesuit order in 1962, on the eve of Vatican Council II, the gathering that sparked so much change and ferment within the church. As part of the 15-year course of Jesuit formation, he took vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience in 1964, taught high school, was ordained in 1973 and earned a doctorate in theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. As a last step, he was to take the final vows.

He never did.

He hesitated, increasingly troubled, he says, by the vow of obedience. He wanted to explore more fully what it entailed. In the process, he says, he became disquieted not only by the “dark side of the church” on authority, birth control, the Vietnam War and women priests, but also by his own silent acquiescence. He had kept his mouth shut and remained seated on the fence.

Not any more. He developed the four-question survey and mailed it out in 1985, the same year that he met Pamela Shoop. (They met, he says, when she was taking instructions, considering conversion to Catholicism. She did not convert.) Although he acknowledges the profound influence that meeting her, and that his brother’s death the same year, had on him, he attributes the survey to his more intellectual and abstract moral dilemma.

In the book and in conversation, he does not give much place to mundane reactions and motivations:

“Suffice to say here,” he writes, “that all the previous years of inquiry, coupled with an awareness of my own past failures and my love for the priesthood and the church, at last led me to the conviction that obedience meant following the truth, regardless of the cost.”

The cost keeps mounting incrementally, as reams of letters and documentation that Sweeney has compiled attest.

Sweeney had mailed his questionnaire to 312 bishops. Despite the survey’s unorthodox nature, quick notoriety and eventual suppression, 145, or 46%, responded. The overwhelming majority, 74%, approved current celibacy policies; less than 10% supported the ordination of women. That there was any disagreement with Vatican policy, however, stirred controversy in the national media.

Still, the institutional church publicly ignored the survey or dismissed it as unscientific.

Father Andrew Greeley, a nationally recognized sociologist and director of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, calls such an assessment “absolutely correct.”

Greeley, himself a Catholic priest, has not read Sweeney’s recent book but is familiar with the survey: “There is this computer word, gigo . It means garbage in; garbage out-- I hate to say it of someone else’s research, but . . . . There’s an inclination of priests and former priests who want to criticize something to turn to sociology to do it.”

After he left the Jesuits, Sweeney could have found work as a diocesan priest, but it would have involved renouncing his survey. His marriage in an Episcopal Church to Shoop ended that possibility. He was suspended as a priest.

Then, early in 1988, he received a letter from Los Angeles Archbishop (now Cardinal) Roger Mahony asking him not to present himself for communion anywhere in the diocese as long as he retained his present marital status. The letter, reprinted in “A Church Divided,” informed Sweeney that should he do so, Mahony had ordered all ministers of communion to refuse him the sacrament and extend him a blessing instead.

Nevertheless, Sweeney says he receives communion here regularly. Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the archdiocese, speculated that some priests, unfamiliar with Sweeney, could have unwittingly given him communion.

Sweeney realizes that part of the rationale for the ban has to do with scandal. He has been very public about his marriage, and for a priest to give him communion might be perceived as the church condoning his action.

“But for me,” he says, “the real scandal is not that a priest falls in love and marries, but that there is a set of laws within the church that forbid it. For 1,700 years, thousands and thousands of people have been hurt by that. That’s the scandal.”

Terry Sweeney is 47 and married to a woman he loves. He has a comfortable home in Sherman Oaks and a successful career in television and screenwriting. He could easily work as a priest or minister in several Christian denominations.

So why bother? Why is it he cannot or will not let go of his relationship to an institution whose authority he says he does not recognize?

“Because so many have bothered with the church,” he says. “A lot of times I feel overwhelmed and crushed. But the church is primarily the people of God. The institutional church is simply an outcropping of the real church.”

He says he has felt abandoned by the institutional church, disillusioned with it and in despair at times. Overcoming such feelings has been a struggle, he says, but he has come through.

And there is this sense of mission: “My research has led me to the conclusion, looking at historical and biblical evidence, that it is un-Christian and unethical to mandate celibacy or continence of priests.”

About the mandate, and the church’s actions over the centuries, he declares that “on three different levels, it contravenes divine law”: It violates the Ninth Commandment not to covet one’s neighbor’s wife, violates the explicit will of Christ regarding marriage and violates the marriage bond.” (Hearing some of Sweeney’s arguments described, Coiro responds, “I suppose it’s how you look at it. I look upon (celibacy) as freely chosen. No one has to become a priest.”)

At times when Sweeney talks of the impact his book will have, it seems he expects it to hit Christendom like a thunderclap: “A lot of priests and bishops are going to read it and go through an enormous sense of confusion and betrayal: ‘Have I made this sacrifice based on the wrong foundation?’ ”

To be sure, Sweeney makes no claim that his mission will be the single force that turns the church around, saying, “I hope the book becomes one of many instruments of change that awaken people to their responsibility and dignity as Christians.” If the changes come in his lifetime, he predicts, it will be because the people of God demand them, not because the hierarchy sees the light.

He sits in his easy chair in a room that is the essence of Americana, in a house on a shady lane that might as well be called Pleasant Street. He is about as far from the temporal and spiritual corridors of the Vatican as one can get, and yet he leans forward, an anomaly, elbows on his knees, oblivious to his surroundings as he talks in detail about canonical law.

Earlier, he had been talking mini-series: of development deals, of producers, agents, publishers, talk shows. Yet words like career, success, ambition, profit, fame, vindication, celebrity do not crop up.

Sweeney discounts any attachment to such earthly matters, describing them simply as a means to a more divinely appointed end.

“From the time I was very small, even in grade school, I felt what I would like most was to help other people find happiness in God,” he says. “And the same thing is true today. That’s what I like doing. If being a successful writer and producer and having recognition advances this, then I welcome it. If helping people find happiness in God means suffering humiliation, being suspended, suffering sanctions, I welcome that too. I will get the truth out there.”

He recalls a peculiar phrase from religious life that sums up his position:

“Tantum quantum,” the former Jesuit intones in Latin. “So much, as much. Or, whatever it takes. . . .”