When I wrote the article “I Am a Priest, I Want to Marry” for The Saturday Post, I had no intention of writing a book.  I had not the time or the need.  When the letters came in response to my article, however, I knew that I must start again.  The letters came in bundles, hundreds of them, from many continents, and I read each word with the hunger of a man who truly wanted to learn.  There were as many from Protestants as from Catholics.  Children wrote, nuns and priests wrote, the feeble and tired hands of the aged wrote.  It was a procession of warm hearts that passed before my eyes and opened to me as I had opened to them.  Most of all the wounded wrote.  The story of my soul had opened the scars in their own.  The letters were more eloquent than anything I could describe, since they were written in innocent blood.  They told me of pains that far surpassed mine, and they begged me to speak for them so that all the world could hear.

Some of the letters scolded me as a spoiled son who wanted the best of both worlds.  Some called me insincere, a “Judas”, a “crybaby” who could not live with the promise he had made.  Some told me that I had no right to happiness because life had offered them only grief and disillusionment.  Some called me a “dangerous minority”, a “deluded and lost soul”, a “sentimental fool”.

Most, however—ten to one, in fact—approved of what I said.  One woman moved me to tears when she wrote: “If such as you walk away, who will stay to care for the sheep?  Please don’t go, stay and fight for justice!”  Priests wrote and told me of the senseless struggle, the loves they had known and surrendered.  Women wrote who loved priests and had lost them to the righteousness of law.  Priests who had left and married wrote and asked that I understand the loneliness of exile from memories and friends.  Protestants offered me shelter in their parish, bishops offered me work in their Episcopal diocese.  Mormons offered love and family in a life of service to the Church.     

Most of all, the suffering wrote, and begged me to write for them.  The divorced and lonely, the couples with too many children, those fearful of sex, the spouses of alcoholics and homosexuals, those denied the sacraments, those whose marriage case was never solved, the sinner who could not be absolved—all of them wrote and filled my nights with suffering and shame.  I, the unworthy priest, was asked to hear the misery of the Christian world without the power of Christ to make them walk.

I had always loved men as best I could, but now I was asked to love them even more.  Names that had never known me told me of their love and concern.  Letters poured in from hands that had never responded to an article before.  These were not the letters of brief and cold comment, but the personal and touching stories of broken hearts.  I had spoken to them and they had answered with the words that no one else had heard.

To these I dedicated my book, to those that have suffered as I, and more.  I thank them for trusting me with their wounds, and promise that I will not cease to seek a healing as long as God shall give me breath.  I well may lose my priesthood, though its passing would not occur with lack of pain.  I shall not lose my faith, though the pressures of my superiors may well reduce it to the faith of a simple man in search of an unknown God.  There is one hope that sustains me in the midst of bitter attack: if a thousand men can understand my cry, then God Himself will not dismiss me without mercy.  I want to speak for His children, for the lonely and the lost, for the sons who find the faith that satisfied their fathers too narrow to fill their present need.  I write not in bitterness, but in love, not in the anger of demolition, but in the challenge of construction.

I need my Church, for without the strength of Christ it gives I cannot live.  I have known its comforts for almost forty years, and feel the right to speak out as a son.  Can I not be a son, your brother, because I do not think as you, or speak as you?  Think before you answer, because I believe my name is legion!