Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests by D. Paul Sullins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests by D. Paul Sullins Stephen J. Fichter Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests. By D. Paul Sullins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 322pp. $29.95. In 1980, towards the beginning of his 26-year-long pontificate, Pope (now Saint) John Paul II opened a door to a married priesthood when he authorized the controversial Pastoral Provision. Even today, 37 years later, most American Catholics are shocked to learn that some married men serve as priests in the Roman Catholic Church. In meticulous (and at times very thick) detail, D. Paul Sullins, himself a Pastoral Provision priest and a sociologist, attempts to explain who these men are and what their journey into the predominantly celibate world of Catholic clergy has been like. While rich in both quantitative and qualitative data, Keeping the Vow is rife with curiosities and a couple of glaring omissions. Sullins’s opening premise is that no book addressing the topic of married [End Page 88] Catholic priests had ever been written prior to his own. That simply is not true. In his Appendix, he indicates that he is reporting the views of the wives of married Catholic priests “for the first time” (227). This too is false. Even the most rudimentary literature review would have revealed that The Pastoral Provisions: Married Catholic Priests and Wives of Catholic Clergy, both written by the well-known Jesuit priest-sociologist Joseph Fichter in 1989 and 1992 respectively, already covered both of these topics extensively. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I mention that I am the grandnephew of Father Fichter and, like he was, I am a celibate Catholic priest-sociologist). The title of each chapter in Sullins’s work is formulated as a question from What Are Married Priests Like? (Chapter 1) to Why Clerical Celibacy? (Chapter 8). Starting with Father Tom (a pseudonym given to preserve anonymity), who is the long-serving pastor of a large Catholic parish in Texas, Sullins introduces the reader to the heart-wrenching journey that these men embarked upon when they decided to break their solemn vows as clergymen in the Episcopal Church in order to “swim the Tiber.” Although many of them lost their Episcopalian friends because of their perceived infidelity, they and their wives were consoled by the warm reception offered to them by both Catholic clergy and laity alike. At various points, Sullins compares married priests to celibate priests. His overall conclusion is that the Pastoral Provision priests are just as effective as their unmarried confreres and actually do not cost that much more to sustain. He also finds that they are happier, more conservative, and in his own words “more Catholic” (47) than celibate priests in general. Sullins’s second glaring omission exposes itself precisely at this point. He chooses not to use the most recent national study of Catholic priests available (Same Call, Different Men: The Evolution of the Priesthood Since Vatican II that my CARA colleagues, Mary Gautier and Paul Perl, and I published in 2012) but chooses to use Dean Hoge’s outdated data from 2001. Had Sullins not ignored the most current information, some of his findings would not be so apparently startling. For example, Hoge’s data reveals that 46 percent of U.S. priests in 2001 reported being “very happy.” Data from 2012 shows a rise to 61 percent, which is only five points lower (a difference that is not statistically significant) than the 66 percent of married priests who report the same. In choosing to use the older data for his point of comparison, Sullins reports a 20-point difference, which obscures the truth. While these two fundamental flaws are puzzling, the real curiosity in Sullins’s work is the almost constant refrain that married priests are better (i.e., happier as cited in the example above) than celibate priests [End Page 89] on almost every measure. Another example is their supposed superior quality of preaching. Sullins quotes an interviewee who says, “You know as well as I do, the preaching in the Roman Catholic Church is pathetic. So any of us who can stand...