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The Other Side of the Altar One Man's Life in the Catholic Priesthood Dinter, Paul E.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003 0374299668 / 9780374299668 Hardcover New in New dust jacket
New book and dust jacket. No marks. Back in the 1950s when Dinter was an altar boy, Catholic priests were generally respected and even revered. By 1993, as he prepared to leave active priesthood, a wave of sexual abuse scandals was engulfing the church. From its low-key title and first chapter, a reader might expect Dinter's memoir, though engagingly written, to be merely a personal account of this time of turmoil. To be sure, one of the book's important themes concerns his search for wholeness and connection through his student days and early years as a parish priest, his 15 years as Catholic chaplain at Columbia University, his sabbatical year in Rome and his eventual decision to resign from the priesthood. A parallel theme is equally important and far more provocative: the story of "how the Catholic priesthood's efforts to control the moral terms of debate regarding the proper role of human sexuality have irrevocably collapsed." Dinter's characterization of the lives of many priests is devastating: intense loneliness, "a variety of self-soothing mechanisms" including solo drinking and sexual acting out, loyalty to the priestly brotherhood rather than to parishioners. Especially damning is the chapter on the Vatican ("The Men's Club on the Tiber") , with its "self-confirmatory culture" and obsession with power. Now happily married with two stepdaughters, Dinter has this advice for church leaders: "Holy fathers! Get back to the drawing board and study nature's God-given designs before you pronounce so firmly about what you do not know and have not even begun to ask women about." ; 0.9 x 8.4 x 5.6 Inches; In all the coverage of the priestly sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, one story has been left untold: the story of the everyday lives of Catholic priests in America, which remain so little understood as to be a secret, even as one priestly sexual predation after another has come to light.
In The Other Side of the Altar, Paul Dinter tells one priest's story--his own--in such a way as to reveal the lives of a generation of priests that spanned two very different eras. These priests entered the ministry in the 1960s, when Catholic seminaries were full of young men inspired by both the Church's ancient faith and the Second Vatican Council's promises of renewal. But by the early 1970s, the priesthood--and the celibate fraternity it depended upon--proved quite different from what the Council had promised. American society had changed, too, particularly in the area of sexuality. As a result, there emerged a clerical subculture of denial and duplicity, which all but guaranteed that the sexual abuse of children by priests would be routinely covered up by the Church's bishops.
Dinter, now married and raising two stepdaughters, left the priesthood in 1994 over the issue of celibacy, but not before having occasion to reflect on the whole range of priestly struggles with celibacy and sexual life in general--in Rome and rural England, on an Ivy League campus, and in parish rectories of the archdiocese of New York. His candid and affecting account--written from the other side of the altar, so to speak--makes clear that celibacy, sexuality, and power among the clergy have long been intertwined, and suggests how much must change if the Catholic Church hopes to regain the trust of its people.
50104
Price:
8.00 USD
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