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Even some members of the hierarchy have come to accept the departure of their trusted servants with something resembling equanimity. Last month, when Msgr. James M. Murray left the priesthood after 28 years in order to marry, he explained to relatives that he "had entered the church by the front door and was leaving by the front door." Thereupon he mounted the pulpit of St. John the Evangelist Church in San Francisco at noon Mass one Sunday and told his congregation all about his decision. Archbishop Joseph McGucken even made a farewell statement of appreciation for his services to the church.
Catholic colleges are now willing to hire ex-priests from elsewhere to teach; some exodus clerics are apparently allowed to remain on their own campuses. Fordham's prominent Jesuit Philosopher Robert O. Johann, who has requested laicization* because of a "growing disaffection with the way in which power and authority are exercised in the official church," is on a year's leave of absence at Holy Cross College; he has been officially welcomed back to Fordham for the school's fall semester. Catholic University Theologian Daniel C. Maguire, who helped draft the critique of Humanae Vitae signed by some 600 U.S. Catholic academics, resigned his ministry last November to marry. He is still an associate professor of religion and ethics at the university and plans to remain so.
The exodus crisis has traditionally been somewhat easier for nuns than for priests. Even sisters bound by solemn vows of chastity "until death" have been able to get dispensations with relative ease. And for a girl trained as a teacher or nurse, the transition to secular status was relatively painless. Leaving today "is a simple matter," says Midge Turk, college editor of Glamour magazine and an Immaculate Heart sister until 1966. ''A nun writes to the Pope. says please-give-me-a-dispensation-because-I-can-no-longer-function-in-this-life, and she almost automatically gets a prompt notification of release from her vows." But there is the fashion syndrome. One former nun recalls the shock of recognition when she first replaced her habit with a mod dress "and discovered my legs hanging out down there."
Even more than priests, nuns leaving church service these days rarely do so with a sense of failure. Says Leonora Kountz, a former Sister of Loretto who is now teaching in Chicago: "My order is one of the most progressive in the U.S. I certainly had no quarrel with them. Quitting was a sort of shifting the weight of my life. One's life has a certain weight, or direction, at one time, but it dawned on me that the weight had shifted toward another direction."
Time to Unwind