(2005-01-30) --The Boston Globe
By Monica Collins

The small ad in the regional edition of TV Guide appeared on the same page as the Sunday-night listings. It asked a simple question - "Is Your Church Closing?" - but it offered a complex solution: "Married priests are available." This was no stunt for Desperate Housewives. The ad pushed the services of married Roman Catholic priests for penance and Masses, urging, "Canon law says you can invite a married priest if you have no priest." The message, a reminder of shuttered Boston-area churches and believers left out in the cold, resonated on a winter's Sunday.

I traced the pitch for www.rentapriest.com to Framingham, where Louise Haggett, the president and founder of Celibacy Is the Issue, a national network of 2,300 married priests, is preparing more print ads for a Lenten campaign. The goal, as before, is to induce the disaffected from closed churches to seek alternative priests who have been banned from offering sacramental services by the Catholic Church. "Altar Girls Were Banned Once" is the slogan on the ad slated to appear in the National Catholic Reporter. ("We don't have the budget to do TV Guide a lot," explains Haggett, a former advertising executive.)

For any Catholic raised on the Baltimore Catechism, married priests is an oxymoron. Yet Haggett and the rent-a-priests, whom she calls "the best-kept secret in the church," participate in their own underground ministry, fully backed, she insists, by arcane tenets of the code of canon law. She cites canon 843, which she contends stipulates that a married priest cannot refuse the invitation of believers who don't have a priest. Canon 27, according to Haggett, allows "as practice becomes custom, custom becomes law, like altar girls." And canon 290 upholds the sanctity of priestly vows - once a priest, always a priest, she says, even without an official license from a bishop.

One married priest, Ron Ingalls of Ashland, knows the official church has its own reading of the code: "The institutional church is not going to accept a liberal interpretation." A former diocesan priest but still a man of faith, Ingalls, 70, does not anticipate recognition for married priests any time soon. "I don't see any hope that married Catholic priests are going to be invited back or that priests who are celibate will be allowed to marry."

The issues and mysteries of clerical marriage have provided intrigue over the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. There is evidence a few early popes were married as well as a couple of Apostles, including Peter. Today, Catholic priests who converted from Protestantism are allowed to stay married. The fascination with Jesus Christ's own marital status has made New Hampshire author Dan Brown a very rich man. Brown presents a tantalizing story in his best-selling The Da Vinci Code of a great love affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

And nuptials are an important rite for a rent-a-priest. Ingalls, who has been married for 25 years, presided at 30 weddings last year, including four gay marriages. He celebrates Mass many Sundays in Framingham at the Masonic Hall (hello, Da Vinci theorists). "We call ourselves the `Come as You Are Inclusive Eucharistic Community,'" Ingalls explains. Participants sit in a circle, the homily is called a dialogue. "We invite and welcome gays, people of color, people who might not be Catholic," he says. "We have had a number of people [attend who were] disgruntled with the closing of parishes or scandalized by the pedophilia crisis, but a number of them don't stay because they don't see the Mass as being the same as in their parish."

As the Catholic Church has been jolted by enormous changes, its faithful continue to seek their spiritual comfort zone. Despite a shortage of priests, the church exists in the hearts, minds, and souls of the people who sit in the circle or on benches, or take over their church buildings, or follow an ad to invite a married priest to officiate at a service. Strength and hope come with community. "The people in the pews have no idea how much power they have," says Haggett. "They have no idea what they can get away with."