William Overstreet Field

Why We Walked Away: Twelve Former Catholic Priests Tell Their Stories William Overstreet Field

Publisher Marketing: Between 1975 and 2008 the Catholic Church in the United States lost just over 18,000 priests. In ecclesiastical parlance these men were defectors, malcontents, and pariahs. But they weren't. These men were the heroes of their generation in the church. They struggled for civil rights, they tried to implement the changes of Vatican II, and they refused to call 'birth control' a sin. Never before have they told their stories - conflict with their bishops, love of their ministry, and waking up to their 'alone-ness' in the world. Here are twelve such stories. "Pope Francis, since being elected Pope, has made some dramatic claims and statements, challenging the curia and Vatican 'business as usual, ' even calling the Papal court 'the leprosy of the papacy.' The stories of bishops and priests, obsessed with power and prestige, show that the stories in this book are not isolated incidents. Pope Francis and his advisers have an enormous task of changing the curia culture in Rome. But Pope Francis will also have to address the issue of whether celibacy is more important than the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. The pope himself has said: 'Celibacy for priests is a matter of discipline, and as such it can change. Celibacy is not a dogma of faith; it is a rule of life that I appreciate a great deal, and I believe it is a gift for the Church. The door is always open, given that it is not a dogma of faith'." - The Publisher Contributor Bio:  Griffin, Ed Ed Griffin teaches creative writing at the Phoenix Centre, a drug and alcohol center. (Phoenix Society). For twenty years he's taught writing in federal prisons He began his professional life in 1962 as a Roman Catholic priest in Cleveland, Ohio. There he became active in the civil rights movement and marched in Selma with Doctor Martin Luther King. Removed from a suburban parish for his activities, he served for three years in Cleveland's central city. His years in the Roman Catholic Priesthood are the subject of his next novel. After leaving the priesthood in 1968 he earned a masters degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was elected to Milwaukee's city council in 1972. Griffin and his wife, Kathy, opened a commercial greenhouse in suburban Milwaukee in 1976. They lived where they worked and shared the joys of raising children and growing flowers. In 1988 the family, Ed and Kathy, Kevin and Kerry, moved to British Columbia, Canada, where Griffin helped establish a dynamic writing community in the city of Surrey. He is the founder of Western Canada's largest writer's conference, the Surrey International Writers' Conference. He has published poetry, plays, short stories and a newspaper column. His writing has won several awards and the American Humanist Society has honored him as the teacher of a prize-winning inmate writer. Griffin believes that all the arts, including writing, should be encouraged in prison. "As Aristotle said, 'art releases unconscious tensions and purges the soul.'"