When Father Patrick Allen lay prostrate before the bishop for his diaconate ordination on June 29, Allen’s son, Henry, ran up to join his dad.
Posted on 07/20/2013 1:45:48 PM PDT by NYer
It was barely a week into Father Patrick Allen’s new ministry when, in the course of taking his two children to activities in his nonreligious clothes, at least five people asked:
So, what do you do for a living?
Allen smiles graciously, sometimes bringing his hand to his chest in a humble gesture, one that coincidentally shows his wedding band.
“This might begin a long conversation,” the James Island father says.
“I’m a Catholic priest.”
When his daughter, Lucy, goes to Charleston Catholic School next year, she will be the only student whose father comes not only for parent conferences and class parties, but also to celebrate Mass.
Ordained a Catholic priest July 7, Allen joins a small but growing group of former Episcopalians embarking on a new journey, one they hope marks a critical step down the long path to Christian unity.
They have embraced a new option in Catholicism that allows Anglicans to become fully Roman Catholic yet retain elements of their liturgical and theological traditions.
Allen is the second Episcopal priest in South Carolina to join the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, often dubbed the “Anglican ordinariate.”
Pope Benedict XVI created the ordinariate, a non-geographic diocese within the Catholic Church, for groups of American Anglicans who wanted to enter full communion with the Vatican.
The result: Two weeks ago, Allen lay prostrate before the Most Rev. Robert Guglielmone, bishop of Charleston.
Those on hand for his ordination included his closest Anglican mentor and friend, the priest who heads the ordinariate and the once-Episcopalian families joining him to create a new Catholic community.
None asked, What do you do?
Circular paths
What he does today, fresh into his Catholic ministry, completes a circular life’s path.
Allen was raised Catholic in a Florida parish until he was 11. Then, his parents began attending an evangelical Presbyterian church.
Ever fascinated by history, he went to college unsure but with an eye toward teaching history.
He attended a Presbyterian seminary college working on his master’s in divinity, though not seriously considering the ministry, much less the Anglican priesthood. Meanwhile, a friend in Charleston invited him to work at Camp St. Christopher.
Allen served as head counselor and then assistant director of the summer camp for nine years, time that proved pivotal to virtually every front of his life.
He confirmed his desire to teach and mentor.
He fell in love with a young woman named Ashley Duckett, who also worked on the camp’s summer staff.
And he met future mentors such as the Rev. M. Dow Sanderson, a deeply intellectual priest who adhered to an Anglo-Catholic tradition that appealed to Allen.
Allen also discovered the Book of Common Prayer.
“I fell in love with it,” he recalls.
He felt drawn to the sacramental nature of Anglicanism and studied people including John Henry Newman, Anglican priest-turned-Catholic cardinal. Newman famously once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
Allen also met the Very Rev. Craige Borrett, rector of Christ St. Paul’s on Yonge’s Island who encouraged the young man to consider becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion’s American province.
“I had successfully avoided the idea up to that point,” Allen says with a grin.
The weight of it
At the University of the South (Sewanee) in Tennessee, Allen was immersed in Anglican studies. He hung a picture of Pope John Paul II on his wall.
Looking back, it seems a prophetic choice.
While delivering the benediction at his ordination in 2001, Allen looked out over the masses kneeling before him.
“The weight of it came to me,” he recalls.
A naturally introverted man, Allen put his studies into action.
“Nothing prepares you for getting involved in people’s lives in such very personal and important ways,” he recalls.
Then-Bishop Edward Salmon assigned him to a tiny parish in Calhoun County.
It was the ultimate gift, Allen later realized.
He was near the parish Sanderson led at the time. While some other Episcopal churches were booming with contemporary services, Sanderson adhered to high Anglicanism.
Meanwhile, Duckett, the young woman he’d been dating, went to medical school at MUSC.
They married in 2003. She did her residency at Vanderbilt University. He moved to a parish nearby.
In time, they returned to her hometown Charleston where she joined MUSC’s faculty.
And Sanderson, then rector of Church of the Holy Communion in downtown Charleston, made a place for Allen.
“Holy Communion has a very unique role in the diocese here,” Allen says.
The parish adheres to the tradition of the Oxford Movement, which asserts Anglicanism’s Catholic continuity with the earlier, pre-Reformation church.
It was, in some ways, an oasis in the storm, a like-minded sanctuary to contemplate and teach even as the Episcopal Church faced growing divisions.
New paths
Cracks of schism were widening nationwide over the Episcopal Church’s ordination of an openly gay bishop and other theological issues. Local Bishop Mark Lawrence and many clergy in town supported a more traditional reading of Scripture.
Ultimately, even Holy Communion could not avoid the question.
When Lawrence and most local parishes disassociated from the Episcopal Church last fall, each parish’s leaders had to decide whether to stay with the national church or go with Lawrence’s group.
Yet, for Allen and many at Holy Communion, the choice was a uniquely different one.
Remain Episcopalian, or pursue a larger reunion of Anglicans and Catholics? Pope Benedict XVI had just created the new ordinariate.
“I already knew I would wind up in the Catholic Church,” says Allen, who by then had two young children.
He had settled into a realization that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be: the church founded by Christ.
At first, he hoped the entire parish would convert.
“But leaving the church they grew up in was not a possibility” for many, he recalls.
Holy Communion remained with the Episcopal Church.
About two dozen members decided on their own to convert to Catholicism. So did Allen.
In a letter to his parish, he wrote: “Mine is a move forward to the Catholic Church, and I am nothing but grateful for my years in the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina.”
Still, it concerns him that the timing could be suspect.
“I didn’t want the fact or appearance of dividing the church and leading people out of there,” Allen says. “Instead, it was a fulfillment of the faith we held.”
At the end of last year, he relinquished his Episcopalian orders and no longer went by “father,” not in the religious sense anyway.
God’s design
Six months later, at his Catholic diaconate ordination, Allen lay prostrate before Bishop Guglielmone. Allen’s 2-year-old son, Henry, ran up to lie down beside his dad.
Someone snapped a photo of the moment.
The picture is, in some ways, a reflection of Allen’s life now. Catholic priest. Father of two. Husband.
“It has worked out the way God designed,” Allen says.
He describes both his former bishop Lawrence and current bishop Guglielmone as gracious and supportive of his move.
He, along with his wife and 19 former Holy Communion members he calls “pilgrims,” were confirmed together last month. They have formed the Corpus Christi Catholic Community, which meets in St. Mary of the Annunciation in downtown Charleston.
When Allen was ordained to the priesthood, Monsignor Jeffrey N. Steenson, head of the American ordinariate, was on hand.
Sanderson and his wife were, too.
“We were so very proud of him as he began this new chapter in his call to serve God,” Sanderson says. “He and I share the same theological core values, and we will always remain close friends.”
Today, Allen is learning the finer points of celebrating Mass and assisting Monsignor Steven Brovey, rector of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. He’s also building Corpus Christi from scratch using a fully Catholic Mass with elements recognizable to any Anglican.
“All things that are good and pure and true in the Anglican church have a home in the Catholic Church,” Allen says.
Pope Benedict compared the ordinariate to building a house and including a room for cherished items from one’s former home.
There’s also a missionary aspect to building Corpus Christi that appeals to Allen.
“It is a seed,” he says. “And my somewhat unique status brings on those questions.”
So, what do you do for a living?
That's an extremely far way away from the statement that the vast majority of child sex molesters are married men.
In fact, because a little more than half of adult men are currently married, and about 70% of men either are currently married, or are divorced or widowed, and because child sex abusers, as you point out, look very much like the general populace, it's unsurprising that a large number of molesters are, indeed, married/widowed/divorced men.
In fact, the statistic I cited was 44%. That's a lot of folks. Nonetheless, if married/widowed/divorced men are roughly 70% of the population, and are roughly 44% of molesters, that means that this population offends at a substantially lower rate than the rest of the population.
sitetest
“Well then you should be able to do your own survey of the research.”
It’s not a topic that so interests me that I’ve tracked the research I’ve read over the years. But the research that I’ve seen that actually measures the demographic features of molesters shows that married men offend at lower rates than the rest of the population.
“I would call this an argument from authority since professionals who treat these people are generally considered as such.”
Having come from the mental health field, and having spent some years with mental health faculty, I take their aggregated opinions with more than a grain of salt.
But even if I didn’t, I’d never take the results of a survey of folks’ OPINIONS about the demographics of a population over actual studies of the demographics of the same population. That’s called choosing sign over sample. Which was one of the first things we were taught not to do in graduate school.
“Actually my assertion was about pedophiles only not those who pursue teenagers.”
My understanding is that folks who exclusively molest young, prepubescent children are a small percentage of child sex abusers overall, perhaps less than 10%. Thus, even if your statistic were accurate, it wouldn’t be all that meaningful, as it would ignore over 90% of abusers.
As well, the study you cite doesn’t indicate that they are asking about attitudes of exclusive pedophiles, but rather use the broader term “child sex abusers.”
Even so, by definition, true, exclusive pedophiles don’t experience sexual satisfaction with adults, and from what I’ve read, are generally somewhat LESS likely to marry (although many marry anyway).
“Your argument is that you don’t recognize the authority of the opinion.”
I certainly take their opinions with a grain of salt. I’ve known mental health researchers who did fine research. But I wouldn’t pay a quarter for their unmoored opinions, professional or otherwise, especially guessing about demographic data.
” I don’t see how morals (because someone won’t or will report crimes) means they can (students) or can’t (professionals) describe the population that produces the crime.”
I don’t see that morality entered into the question. My professors had very good reasons to oppose mandatory reporting. They had cogent and logical arguments. They were trying to do what was right by the victims, by the offenders, and by other interested parties.
But we students had our side, as well. And we had our reasons, our arguments, our logic. We, too, were trying to do what was right by folks. And in my view, we had the stronger argument. I also happen to think that we students have been vindicated by revelations of the past couple of decades.
I didn’t think my professors were immoral. Just wrong.
And they were.
“On reporting sex crimes ....the Catholic Church has defended the sanctity of confession on this very issue. Is it immoral too?”
In that I didn’t impute immorality to my professors over this question, why would I impute immorality to those who believe in the seal of the confessional.
However, I agree with the absolute seal of the confessional, and have at least enough wisdom to distinguish between a psychotherapist who tries to heal a psyche and a priest who forgives sin.
In looking further at the study you cite, their citation of the Abel, Becker, et. al. study seems straight up. They don’t appear to make any effort to undermine the result that suggests that “most CSA perpetrators are White males, in their thirties, single, fairly well educated, and employed[.]”
Indeed, this meme, that ordinary married men are the chief source of child sex abuse, arose primarily in the context of the homosexual agenda, to hide the fact rates of abuse by homosexuals far exceeds rates of abuse of heterosexuals, generally. Obviously, as homosexuals comprise only around 1% - 3% of the population, and generally speaking, most of the rest of the other 97% of folks can be accurately described as heterosexual, in absolute numbers, heterosexuals commit more child sex abuse. But they don’t offend at higher rates than homosexuals, just the opposite.
Finally, the idea that the population of married men, which is a little over 50% of the adult male population, comprises 78% of child sex abusers is so over the top, it shocks me that anyone who isn’t warped or distorted by some sort of sick agenda would actually think that.
Against all evidence to the contrary, such a person is asserting that married men commit child sex abuse at rate 50% above the average of the entire male population, and commit abuse at higher rates than either single or divorced men.
sitetest
You've been shadow boxing with your own fallacious idea. I've never heard this meme and I haven't said one thing about the general population of married men. I have completely restricted my remarks to the rare group of people that are pedophiles and that's because they and only they are associated with the priesthood. That makes them significant. Combining pedophiles with (what used to be called) ebophiles together hides the homosexual behavior because they are part of the second group and have different demographic characteristics.
As I posted before, describing pedophiles as married says something about the general population of pedophiles not the general population of married men.
The media constantly puts out the idea that the Catholic priesthood is filled with pedophiles and people suddenly believe the solution to this is to allow married men. It's repeated on this site, I see it mentioned in public and have heard it tossed out by people at work. The Church itself is responding to it in the “Protecting God's Children” program which concentrates heavily on pedophiles and says very little about those who pursue teenagers. Allowing marriage will not weed out pedophiles and does nothing to protect the group of children who are at risk from homosexuals.
“You've been shadow boxing with your own fallacious idea. I've never heard this meme and I haven't said one thing about the general population of married men.”
You haven't been paying attention over the past few decades.
I can't tell you how often I've heard folks, to counter the fact that homosexuals abuse minors at a far higher rate than heterosexuals, that “most abuse is by heterosexual [or even married] men.” I first heard this in a psychology class in 1977.
“I have completely restricted my remarks to the rare group of people that are pedophiles and that's because they and only they are associated with the priesthood.”
I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate with this. Obviously, the child sex abuse scandal in the Church was mostly about homosexual priests who preyed mostly on pubescent boys.
“As I posted before, describing pedophiles as married says something about the general population of pedophiles not the general population of married men.”
Although the word you used originally was “pedophile,” the study you cited doesn't seem to use that language or restrict itself thusly. In any event, although I've seen assertions to the contrary, most cites I've seen suggest that among the less than 10% of abusers who are “true pedophiles” - folks whose primary sexual orientation is neither heterosexual or homosexual (and even that designation is disputed) - most “true pedophiles” do not, indeed, marry, especially because nearly by definition, someone who engages in the marital act with an adult spouse isn't a “true pedophile.”
Thus, although there will be some folks who are “true pedophiles” (if that is truly a valid category of sexual orientation) who marry, to say that the vast majority of them are married is an astounding claim and requires astounding evidence. You haven't presented any astounding evidence of the claim, nor even any direct evidence of the claim, but only very weak indirect evidence.
As for the media, they generally use the word “pedophile” interchangeably with phrases like “child molester” or “child sex abuser.” The distinction between the two terms is lost on the media, and thus talking about it is pretty irrelevant.
The Church also makes a similar confusion.
It is true that permitting priests to be married men wouldn't substantially alter the number of “true pedophiles” in the priesthood, but that's not because married men comprise the “vast majority” of pedophiles (a terrible libel), but rather that so few priests were “true pedophiles” (again, if such a category exists objectively) in the first place.
sitetest
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