IN SOME WAYS, the Church’s posture toward priests who leave the "clerical state," as married priests call the priesthood, has improved over the years. In the late 1960s, when clergymen were fleeing their dioceses in droves, Church superiors looked upon priests who wished to marry with disdain, as if they were traitors, failures, and, in the words of one married priest, "pariahs." Says Father Thomas Doyle, a clergy-abuse expert who has served as a Catholic priest for 32 years, "If you left the priesthood up until the 1970s, you were as good as dead." These men, he says, "had so much guilt heaped on them. They faced a terrible, judgmental attitude."

Today, the stigma associated with leaving the clergy has dissipated. Priests who resign aren’t necessarily made to feel ashamed for falling in love and, in essence, recognizing their humanity. Some Church superiors take the news of a priest’s departure in stride, as if resigned to the inevitable. Paul Roma, 66, a married priest from Portland, Maine, remembers feeling "taken aback" by his bishop’s reaction to his decision to leave, in 1998. "He said, ‘Go ahead and go,’ " Roma recalls. "He gave no arguments. Nothing." Other officials lend a helping hand to their former priests — something that never happened in the 1960s.

This is not to say that Church officials regard married priests as equals. Those who seek an official departure from the priesthood must become "laicized," which means that their religious vows are annulled. Laicization allows priests to marry inside the Church, albeit in secret, with no guests or witnesses. But this privilege comes with a steep price. Once laicized, a priest cannot wear his priestly garb. He cannot identify himself as a former priest. He cannot teach catechism, read the liturgy at Mass, or distribute the communion — all of which a Catholic lay person can do. In short, a laicized priest gets wiped off the books as if he’d never served the institutional Church at all.

Many former priests find the process so degrading that they refuse to go through with it. A priest who petitions for laicization must declare not only that he cannot live up to his celibacy vows, but also that his ordination amounts to a big mistake. According to the Church’s laicization petition, a copy of which was obtained by the Phoenix, a laicized priest has to agree to move miles away from "the area where his previous condition is known," so as "to avoid scandal and astonishment on the part of the faithful."

"The process is insulting," says Terry McDonough, 65, a married priest from Duxbury, Massachusetts, who applied for laicization in 1984 — only to withdraw his petition months later. He was subsequently kicked out of the priesthood. He adds, "I wasn’t about to say my ordination was invalid. To me, that wasn’t the issue. The clerical culture and lifestyle was the mistake."

McDonough, now a rehabilitation specialist at a Bedford hospital, has yet to shake the sense of shame that he endured upon leaving the priesthood in 1984. Back then, he was a 48-year-old Air Force chaplain who had been in the active ministry for 22 years — as a missionary in Indonesia, a seminary teacher in Wisconsin, and the chaplain at Hanscom Air Force Base, in Bedford. He had lived the priestly life long before his 1962 ordination. At 13, he left the Charlestown projects where he was born and entered seminary. For years, he embraced what he now bitterly calls "this priestly stuff" — until he befriended a woman named Susan in the early 1980s. Their friendship would force him to contemplate his celibacy for the first time.

"It dawned on me that I wasn’t participating in life," McDonough says. "I had no experience of adult relationships, of families and children.... As a priest, you feel lonely in the midst of a crowd." And so, in February 1984, McDonough sent a request to the Air Force chaplaincy asking for a transfer from the priesthood into military-officer service. "That’s when all hell broke loose."

When McDonough announced his plans to marry Susan, now his wife of 18 years, his fellow chaplains encouraged him to shack up with her secretly instead. When he balked, his request for a transfer was denied. Bernard Cardinal Law, the archbishop of Boston, wrote letters to the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Coast Guard chiefs saying that if they accepted McDonough as an officer, the Church would never again endorse another Catholic chaplain for the armed services. The Air Force chaplaincy then booted McDonough off the base in the dead of winter, with nothing to his name. It even stripped him of his military-issued coat. McDonough eventually sued the Air Force for reinstatement — and won. The Board for Correction of Military Records found the Air Force had acted improperly in discharging him because of "undue influence by the Roman Catholic Church." But at the time, says McDonough, "I had lost my identity, my job, my future — everything except Susan."

That the Catholic Church, the world’s largest spiritual institution, could behave in such a vindictive manner might have shocked us a year ago. But if the unfolding clergy sexual-abuse scandal has shown anything, it’s that the Church hierarchy often acts in the most un-Christlike ways. The treatment dealt to former clergymen like McDonough seems tragically harsh. After all, priests who leave the active ministry do not simply get up and go. Typically, it takes years before they can admit their feelings; then, they have to muster the strength to act.

Paul Roma, for example, wrestled with emotions of denial, guilt, and angst for nine years before he left the priesthood in 1998. Since childhood, Roma had his heart set on becoming a priest. But as a teen, he felt bound by another duty, the military. He entered the Navy in 1953. He later married, had five children, and lived an everyday officer’s life — until his wife died of breast cancer in 1983. Her death prompted Roma to reconsider his boyhood dream. By then, he had become a deacon at a San Bernardino, California, parish. "I really felt drawn into being a full-fledged priest," he recalls. At age 48, in 1984, he entered seminary.

Four years later, he was ordained in the Manchester, New Hampshire, diocese, where he worked for a decade. He met his current wife, Germaine, at his first assignment in a Pelham, New Hampshire, parish. When he noticed a "spark" of attraction between them, he panicked. He had just devoted years to training for the clergy. His identity had become tied up in the Church. "I didn’t want to fall in love," he says. "I knew what people would say if I left." He knew that the Church would ostracize him — and that he would lose his $700 monthly stipend, lodging, car, and medical insurance. He figured the best thing to do would be to "get away from such a tempting situation." So, in 1990, he went into the Navy again — this time, as a base chaplain.

Finally, after years of writing letters to Germaine, his heart won out. "It was like I was walking on top of a picket fence," he says. "Marriage was on one side and the priesthood on the other. I couldn’t walk the line anymore." When he left the clergy, Roma knew he was viewed as a scandal in the Church’s eyes. But if he didn’t leave, he says, he might have become "an even bigger scandal" by breaking his celibacy vows.

To this day, men who left the priesthood to marry, such as Roma and McDonough, continue to feel let down by the Church hierarchy. After decades of devoted service, many are denied their hard-earned pensions. Most Catholic dioceses, including the Boston archdiocese, refuse to offer any type of retirement benefit to priests who resign to marry — classifying them as priests "not in good standing." And at least in the case of the Boston archdiocese, benefits are denied even though priests pay into the system while wearing the collar. According to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCB), the average priestly retirement benefit differs from diocese to diocese, ranging anywhere from $500 to $1100 per month. Yet according to a 1999 survey conducted by the National Federation of Priest Councils, a nationwide association of diocesan and religious-order priests, only 28 dioceses out of 158 respondents include resigned priests in their pension plans. "I call that elder abuse," says William Manseau, 66, a former Lowell priest whose 1969 marriage to a former Boston nun named Mary made banner headlines in Boston. "The Church is stealing from me and any other resigned priest when it denies us our just compensation."

Manseau is among hundreds of former priests now pushing the pension issue. The movement began in 1994, when former priest Paul McGreevy, a San Diego attorney who had resigned from the Boston archdiocese, tried to obtain benefits for a disabled, resigned priest who, despite 29 years of service, found himself practically destitute. McGreevy sent as many as 4000 letters to archdiocesan officials and organized 60 married priests who believe they have a right to collect their benefits. Yet it took three years’ work and a scathing March 1, 1997, column by Eileen McNamara in the Boston Globe to force Cardinal Law to acknowledge the priests’ request. The effort, now headed by Manseau, has grown beyond the Hub to include some 130 dioceses nationwide.

But the cardinal’s response to the initiative seemed half-hearted. In a March 17, 1997, letter addressed to Manseau, Law wrote that the archdiocese has "no civil or canonical obligation to provide benefits" to married priests. That argument, of course, also favors the archdiocese’s self-interest: according to a February 14, 1997, Church memorandum on the issue, which was obtained by the Phoenix, 117 inactive Boston priests were eligible for some type of pension — at a cost to the archdiocese of between "$750,000 and $1 million" at the time.

Other Church-affiliated organizations actually contradict the cardinal’s contention. In 1999, in fact, the Canon Law Society of America (CLSA), a Washington, DC–based professional group of canon lawyers, published a report titled "Retirement Benefits of Retired Church Personnel in the United States of America," in which it explored what it called the "canonical obligations of justice for retired Church workers," including priests who leave the clergy. According to the report, canon law dictates that "a priest who has dedicated himself to an ecclesiastical ministry has a right to a pension." Resigned priests who work in secular jobs, the report states, "should be entitled to a pension payment upon retirement, however small that amount [may] be."

While the Church appears to have a canonical obligation to pay pensions to married priests, it isn’t necessarily mandated by federal law. According to the UCCB, few Catholic dioceses have a pension plan that’s registered with the federal government — and thus subject to labor-law regulation. "Many dioceses don’t have a true pension plan," explains Sister Mary Anne Walsh, a UCCB spokesperson. "What they have is a charitable fund for the care of retired priests" in need of support. Some dioceses, such as the Diocese of Sioux City, in Iowa, do have a pension plan. But for those without plans, Walsh says, "there would be no legal obligation" to pay retirement benefits to resigned priests.

Although Cardinal Law has refused to pay pensions to married priests, he has maintained the position articulated in his 1997 letter that "[t]he Archdiocese and I would not want any priest to find himself in his later years living in penury." To this end, the archdiocese has set aside a token sum to bestow on former priests who can prove that they’re needy. In other words, it hands out cheap donations. One of the 60 retired priests pushing the issue — who paid about $150 annually into an archdiocesan account for 22 years before leaving to marry in the 1970s — wryly notes, "This is about justice. But to Bernie Law, married priests have become pure charity. Isn’t that sweet?"