James McLellan

Married Priests Love - Theologian

Reverend James McLellan

My name is James Charles McLellan. Born 5/23/39 in South Bend Indiana. I entered the seminary at 14, the novitiate at 18, and Notre Dame at 19. In high school we studied very little science but a lot of Latin and Greek plus either German or French. In the novitiate a few of us became very acquainted with the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross plus the Cloud of Unknowing. In college we were expected to major in philosophy. Double majors were seldom allowed, and then only if you were a “late” vocation, meaning after high school. The minor was in classics, of course. There, too, we didn’t have much science. Freshman math was taught by a grad student named James Bond (yes!). We lived a secluded life here, as in high school. We did attend some classes on campus but could not socialize, could not join any clubs. During the novitiate a record of Resphigi’s “Pines and Fountains of Rome” had a picture cover of the Appian Way in Rome. That course of studies became a target for me.

After graduating from college a friend and I studied Italian in private and I left with four confreres for Rome in September, 1962. A few days after arriving Vatican II opened, which we were permitted to witness. During the Council we were visited by the experts, periti, of the Council for evening talks. These were voluntary. In that international house we could accommodate English, French, Italian and Latin and the food was good. The house provided a driver. So virtually all the teachers of the bishops and a few of these, too, came to speak to us, except Bernard Haring. We did not appreciate what we were hearing, mostly because of our ages. But being there stamped us for life, especially anybody who later became a professional theologian. Yes, we were optimistic and as young, naïve, though some said that it’s quite easy to lose your faith in Rome. The Roman oral exam system was hard on us Americans, but nobody in our class failed to get his STL.

Thereupon I was sent to do ordinary parish duty in South Bend. While there, they let me take a full Russian language course at Notre Dame. I did experience an inkling of what friendship with a woman might one day bring. In August, 1967, I left for Europe. At first I had a German language course at the University of Vienna and, arriving in Muenster, I at first lived in a convent attached to a city clinic, across the street from the city’s synagogue. When I first received that obedience, it read Munich, so I had to phone the provincial house and get the word changed to Muenster. I spoke to a few professors and finally made an arrangement with Johannes G Remmers, a diocesan priest from the Netherlands. He was gifted in languages and one of the founders of Concilium. His specialty was the theology of the Eastern Church. In his group I quickly discovered how woeful our education in history had been: I felt like a high school kid. He never had many students. Three of us obtained our doctorates under him: a German, a Greek lay theologian, and I, who started first and finished last.

Perhaps during my parish work I began to devise the title of my dissertation, The Saving Power of Human Love in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. That topic did not involve me in the liberal-conservative department wars and allowed my prof’s exam to substitute for an oral exam at the hands of two of their conservative and harsh historians. Not to go into too much detail: I became very fond of Vladimir Solovyev, who lectured on Godmanhood to the local intelligentsia. Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky heard him in the same room but their mutual friend never introduced them, so they never met. The brilliant and quite-Orthodox nugget I gleaned from his lecture is that using alien means, such as the army and the police, to promote religious uniformity manifests unbelief in the power of God. He doesn’t need that sort of help. So I assumed he helped Fyodor with his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the most prophetic works I’ve ever read! Now nobody in the Catholic theology faculty had ever written a dissertation on literature but I dared it anyway. It went through two revisions and was finally accepted by the faculty in 1979. But I finished it in the United States.

My province was upset at the length of my studies so it called me back in 1977. During a brief stay at the college seminary I noticed what some would call gay sentiments during a final profession ceremony. Nothing like that ever happened while I was in formation. They meant the greeting of peace. Then I visited my relatives and ended up at a small university in Oregon. I was informed that the local house council consented to my assignment – and I thought a provincial was in his rights to simply assign you such a post. I lived near the president of this small university. At first, he said he thought they could make room for me. During my 2^nd semester there I was permitted to teach a core course in theology. I did not obey the boss’s request to raise a number of nurses’ grades from a B to an A because they earned Bs. I next went to a downtown parish and began hospital ministry, where I stayed for two years. After talking to the provincial again, I was allowed to live with the local community, teaching a course each semester, but I had to advertise through flyers and students couldn’t have known me. Judgment: you had too few students, so where will you live next year? During that summer I went to an Anchorage parish for 6 weeks and went back to the Northwest, where I couldn’t find a position. Off to Illinois, near Chicago.

Eventually, after more hospital ministry, I spoke to the personnel manager of the archdiocese. He informed me that a small college was looking for a priest. I interviewed and then was told nothing. In the summer of 1983 they said I could move in and teach theology courses. I continued to teach, successfully, my Theology of Love and Friendship. Living in a convent wasn’t ideal and locals were not hospitable. My community in the area almost never visited me.

One of my best students was my future wife, Jeana. In counseling I learned about her broken marriage (no doubt invalid from the outset many years before). We became very attached to each other. The brethren in the diaspora around the metropolis had to meet about once per month in an expensive lakeshore drive condo above Grant Park. The boss was prone to recount his world-wide travels which we, with jobs, could not swing. This rubbed me and some prominent community members the wrong way. He was a director with the clubby rights of a superior so he could stay on far longer than the normal six years. If you didn’t obey, he threatened to move you to a high school. Not quite my idea of a community that claimed to have “community spirit” as its guiding virtue.

During a crisis she told me she had to give her marriage one last try and I didn’t know if I would ever be permitted to speak to her again. The Silence lasted about 9 months. That did not work as planned: we were far too involved for that. Her ex, after he dumped her, went to my superior in my home town and informed him I was dating a divorced woman. That led to an ultimatum letter in the late fall of 1988. After much reflection I told them I could not give her up. So the assistant provincial handled my case. They were always polite and kind. A couple of years before this I read the text of the request for the favor of a dispensation from celibacy. You could claim you were never called: you weren’t free, were mentally unstable, had uncontrollable sex urges, were forced to accept ordination, and so forth. Anything to make the Roman authorities look good. I also knew that if you lied on such a form, the dispensation wasn’t even valid! So I didn’t take that route and was never pressed to do so.

It was common to expect the departing to leave the area where they had worked so we moved to the East Coast. Unfortunately, “grown” children ended up living with us for years without behaving well. We did not assert ourselves as we should have and made various financial and job-related mistakes. What is important, however, is that the transition itself never felt like a betrayal of God or the Church but just a different path. I had at least emotionally lived a split life for quite a while, so moving together and marrying was totally natural. A Corpus priest presided. Acquaintance with some Corpus members confirmed us in this feeling. We frequently moved throughout the US and became closer through the years. From early on I had viewed myself as a theologian first, then a priest. The entire theological retrenchment under JP II and the disavowal of Vatican II hit me hard. During my teaching I saw correctly where the Latin Church was headed and I was quite upset. Could I just repeat the party line in moral theology? So I dodged somewhat and taught conscience, about which the hierarchy says not a word today!

Yes, I accept the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed and so I believe in the Holy Spirit. I do not believe in Rome’s harsh disciplining of creative theologians. I believe that the “sense of the faithful” comes from the indwelling of the Trinity in the minds and hearts of these faithful. So these old men in Rome will not be able to ruin the Church despite all the harm they are doing. They ended up causing organizations like Corpus and Citi.

Some will ask why I left clerical life. I was isolated for many years. Community life as experienced during formation was gone. Friends were scattered throughout the world – before we had Internet access. Our province had around 450 members so that others called it the “corporation.” During theology a superior posted a note from the provincial house asking who was ordained months ago because he needed manpower. JP 2 cracked down on theologians. Rabid parents even wrote Rome about high school teachers’ orthodoxy. I wanted to publish freely but knew that all religious had to get the approval of superiors for literally any publication. A provincial told me that upon my death I would be granted one foot of shelf space for whatever legacy I had (which didn’t guarantee the public would ever see it). You were encouraged to practice self-censorship, which a therapist told me is quite dangerous. A story had religious, at one’s death, coming in to clean up whatever you left behind. What if a superior wanted to make sure that the good name of Holy Mother Church might be harmed? So life’s work could be destroyed. I remembered that Teilhard de Chardin was obedient to his Jesuit superiors when they ordered him to keep silent about his latest insights. He did and so, today, we will never know what place sin and evil had in his world view as explained in his Phenomenon of Man. He couldn’t clarify or modify what he had written nor could he defend it. The sexual love factor should be clear to any thinking human being. A troubled lady, whom I eventually married, came to me with all her problems. What was for a year purely professional became personal. We endured many trials. The more people tried to interfere, the more in love we became. The separation proved conclusively that we could not be happy or productive if not together. Finally, her divorce paved the way for our final decision. I had already devoted 22 years to the study of love (friendship and sexual). The transition was, in this respect, extremely smooth, unlike what others predicted. Not back then, by the way, were clerical abuse and its cover-up prominent in the news. Homosexuality I had not noticed, though in my pastoral life I tried to be as helpful a confessor as possible, and I became acquainted with the writing of John McNeill, SJ.

Some might ask, “Would you return to clerical ministry if you could do so while married?” Today, under harsh censorship, no. Under the rule of a John XXIII, I could: within the guidelines and in the spirit of Vatican II, and on a part-time basis as a supply priest. Could I play the game and “live as brother and sister”? Such a promise simply reinforces corporate hypocrisy. In Rome they used to say, “What you do doesn’t matter, what you say does!” That Latin mentality is unacceptable to most of us in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. What about widespread practices in Africa and Latin America? The bishops are more concerned about pastoral care than about the letter of man-made rules and I admire them.

How am I different from ordinary pastoral priests who serve and try to make the best of a bad situation? I admire them, too, and respect them. Those I refer to are not professional theologians and can perform mental gymnastics in order to humbly serve their people out of love. This they can do with a good conscience. For the reasons given above, I could not.

As a theologian I grant that there is a difference between official Church doctrine as taught by the bishops of Benedict 16 and the work of theologians. What Fr. X personally believes doesn’t necessarily agree with that doctrine. People can easily look up official doctrine. But if they are curious or needy, they often need far more, especially on controversial matters such as artificial contraception, artificial insemination, stem cell research, admission of the remarried to the sacraments, intercommunion, married priests and placing women in positions of authority, as deaconesses to start with, just to mention the most obvious. Bishop Y, when queried, would simply repeat the official teaching whereas theologians know that many non-infallible doctrines change through the centuries. Harsh bishops want to police universities: I do not believe this furthers the pastoral mission of the Church.

Jeana sits in on my interview of a couple, scheduled several weeks or even months before the wedding. Two heads are better than one during an interview. So our perspectives differ slightly. We’ve spoken to very few whom we could not serve. She corrects me if she has to but usually she will say afterwards, instead, that I talked too much. That’s less likely today: it’s not exactly a teaching role. She attends each wedding unless her work schedule at Costco makes it impossible. She has spiritually and emotionally supported me all the while I’ve lived as an underground priest. Some Iron Curtain countries did have underground clergy. Today I appreciate their prophetic work all the more. How big is that difference between them and married priests today who did not convert from another church community? Oh yes: we can’t yet be thrown into prison for our CITI ministry.

Through Jeana’s relatives I also learned the limits of “saving love.” My dissertation director, J G Remmers, a Dutch diocesan priest, once on the board of Concilium, once warned me: “Some people are incapable of love.” He was more like Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, I like Alyosha. So the big roadblock to many relationships is free will. I learned this the hard way; Jeana has supported me in holding true to my ideals. You do what your conscience dictates, give good example and then pray for their conversion. I’m unsure that most celibate priests know what it’s like to be obliged to interact with hateful relatives. That can be more hurtful than an authoritarian bishop.

Jeana would be invaluable in official ministry. She doesn’t take nonsense from bishops as they fixate on Casti Connubii and take a hard line on all possible sexual matters. She doesn’t appreciate their political swing from the tradition of their forebears, either. Money talks all too loudly!

Email: mclellan91@msn.com

Website: www.mclellan91spacelive.com

Tel: 719-260-6017

Location: Denver, CO