"A priest who wants to break with the Roman Catholic Church is helpless,'' says the Rev. Herman Johannes Hegger, 46, a minister in the Calvinist Church of The Netherlands. "He needs somebody, just for the simple things in life, because he is actually left on the street without a penny and without a decent suit." Hegger should know—he was once a Roman Catholic priest himself. This week, Hegger will open Europe's first organized haven for ex-priests: a 17-room house in the village of Velp. near Arnhem. To be known as the Wartburg. in memory of the castle where Martin Luther found refuge after his condemnation by the Diet of Worms in 1521, Hegger's haven will provide temporary shelter for clerics who have turned in their Roman collars.
The Wartburg will provide former priests with free food, clothing, lodging, and a quiet room for study. After six or eight weeks, Hegger will arrange for his clients to live with sympathetic Dutch families. Hegger believes that his own experience should help him guide others through their spiritual crisis, and as a Calvinist he hopes to convince them that his own church represents the answer to their spiritual needs. Only two kinds of ex-priests are barred from the Wartburg: converts to Communism, and clerics who are wanted by the police on criminal charges.
Doubts About Dogma. A seminary student from the age of twelve, Hegger was ordained as a priest in 1936. Even as a novice, he had doubts about Catholicism's Marian dogmas and about papal infallibility; as a priest, he also came to question the validity of the Mass and confession. Sent to Brazil to teach philosophy, Hegger learned the tenets of Protestantism from a Methodist pastor in Rio ; in July 1948 he formally left the church.
Returning to The Netherlands, Hegger studied at the Calvinist Free University in Amsterdam, incorporated a foundation for ex-priests called "On Straight Street. '' * began publishing a monthly magazine that now claims a circulation of 13,000. He married a woman he met a year after quitting the church, and began using their home as a temporary haven for ex-clergy.
The Age of Defection. Hegger argues that there is a real need for his un usual kind of ministry. Last year the Archdiocese of Utrecht admitted that 180 Dutch priests were living outside the church. Hegger says that in Italy and France 6,700 priests have fallen away from Catholicism since World War II.
Spain now is beginning to produce a number of defectors. He believes that the difficulty of living under the priestly vow of celibacy is the major single spur for clerical defection of men around the age of 40, but doubts about Roman Catholic teaching are the usual general cause.
Hegger thinks that former Trappists, who observe almost total silence, find it hardest to adjust to their new status as laymen. But all, as outlaws from their church, face a difficult future. They know-little else but how to preach or say Mass, must learn to live with the emotional hostility many Christians feel toward someone who has forsaken a sacred calling. "They need help.'' Hegger says. "They are so much alone."
* From Acts Q. which tells how the Christian disciple Ananias receives a vision from God to visit a house on Straight Street in Damascus; there he restores the sight of newly converted St. Paul.