(2005-12-23) --Scribb-Howard
By Lisa Hoffman

For more than 27 years, David Roeding was a Roman Catholic priest in northern Kentucky, where he helped couples prepare for marriage and ministered to divorced and separated Catholics.

But in 1994, it was his own matrimony that led him to leave the institutionalchurch to which he had devoted most of his life. He had fallen in love so profoundly that he chose to give up his career within the church to marry Lynn, who he describes as his "wife and spiritual partner."

The decision was "heart rending" for Roeding who said his entire youth was spent preparing for the priesthood and his middle age to serving the church. "It was very difficult to walk away," he said.

During his clerical tenure, Roeding was a parish priest and director of the diocese's Family Life Bureau, which runs the marriage preparation programs mandatory for all couples seeking to be married in the diocese. He also founded and led a ministry to Catholics whose marriages had ended or were in trouble.

After he left the clergy, Roeding worked as job-placement counselor, a mediator and a sales director for a health care-related company. Now, he leads a prayer group and occasionally performs weddings, but only for couples seeking a "spiritual dimension."

Being married has benefited his ministry, adding a new dimension to his spirituality and calling, he said.

"I am very, very happy. Very much at peace with myself," Roeding said. Even so, he said he misses the church. "I would go back to active ministry tomorrow," he said.

Daniel Porter joined the Catholic Church after a stint in the Air Force, where he served as everything from a cook to a secretary for two German scientists working with the U.S. military in Alamagordo, N.M.

Born a Baptist, he found contradictions in the faith and felt a calling to Catholicism. After finishing the seminary and being ordained in 1966, Porter was assigned to the diocese in Buffalo, N.Y. It was at the height of the civil rights movement, but the Catholic bishop there forbade his priests from participating in any way.

Porter, now 74, said he made a "moral decision" to leave the church after four years as a priest. "I couldn't in good conscience continue to serve," he said.

From there, he joined a newly formed human rights commission in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and, later, married. During that eight-year-union, he helped raise his wife's two sons.

Porter's focus on civil rights and community action continued. He became executive director of CODE NORTH Inc., the first crime prevention program in Shelby County, Tenn. Then he served 23 years with the Tennessee Human Rights Commission until retiring in 1998.

Now, Porter is a chaplain for the Tennessee State Guard, an all-volunteer militia. He is also listed in the "Rent-A-Priest" referral directory of Celibacy Is The Issue, a national organization of married priests. Porter says he occasionally performs wedding ceremonies and visits nursing homes.

It was 1971, a time of ferment in the streets of America and in the Catholic Church, that John Hydar met the woman who would become his wife. He was a Catholic priest in Los Angeles, she was a nun teaching in a parish school. They became friends, then realized "there was something more going on," Hydar said.

After nine years as a cleric in three parishes, Hydar left the church, as did his wife-to-be, Roberta. They've been married ever since.

In the 1990s, Hydar said he felt his spiritual heart calling him. He became affiliated with the Celibacy Is The Issue national married priest group, and, for a time performed as many as 60 weddings a year for couples in Ventura County, Los Angeles and nearby California areas who found his name in the Rent-a-Priest directory.

Far from hurting the church, Hydar says his individual ministry has actually served to keep fallen Catholics close to the church. "It has been very rewarding," he said.

Now, he's semi-retired from that pursuit. Hydar, 71, and his wife spend months on the road in their motor home. They also are active in their local parish.

Hydar says being a priest remains fundamentally important to him. "It is something that is part of who I am and what I am and what I will be," he said.