The Other Side of the Altar

An ex-priest shares the true story of his difficult celibate life—and his perspective on the abuses resulting from the Catholic Church's stance on sex. In all the coverage of the priestly sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, one story has been left untold: the story of the little understood, nearly secret everyday lives of Catholic priests in America, even as one priestly sexual predation after another has come to light. In telling his story, Paul E. Dinter reveals 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 with 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 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 explains 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.