chloe
03-17-2010, 08:27 PM
By ANGELA CHARLTON and VICTOR L. SIMPSON
Associated Press Writers
Leon Laclau shared his life, and often, his bed, with Marga over 20 years all while serving as a Catholic priest in a town in the French Pyrenees.
His clerical leadership eventually expelled him, prompting protests from his flock and inspiring other priests and their partners around France to speak out about long-hidden love lives, and to press the Church to abandon its insistence on celibacy.
They say the chastity rule has fed the persistent, profound decline in the numbers of European and American priests. More influential voices are joining them as scandals involving sexual abuse and pedophilia spread across parishes around Europe.
The Vatican rejects any link between celibacy and sex abuse and shows no sign it intends to loosen its rules. Instead, church leaders are likely to continue a don't ask-don't tell policy of ignoring priestly relationships, as long as they cause no harm.
"Love, my love for Marga, never held me back from having faith. On the contrary, it encouraged me," Laclau told The Associated Press by telephone from his home in Asson, in the mountains near the pilgrimage site at Lourdes. "I lived my love life with Marga, and I kept my passion for the church."
The two met when Laclau led the funeral service for Marga's first husband in 1985. When their relationship blossomed, he said, "at first, we tried to hide it."
Slowly their friends learned, and Laclau's church colleagues, who met them "with a silence, not of disapproval, but of non-interference," he said.
The church's quiet tolerance melted when Marga came to live with Leon in 2001. Laclau's superior, Father Benat Oyhenart, asked him to "purify the relationship" _ in essence to choose between his vocation and his love.
Laclau chose Marga. In 2007, he was forced out of the priesthood.
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=235&sid=10046537
Associated Press Writers
Leon Laclau shared his life, and often, his bed, with Marga over 20 years all while serving as a Catholic priest in a town in the French Pyrenees.
His clerical leadership eventually expelled him, prompting protests from his flock and inspiring other priests and their partners around France to speak out about long-hidden love lives, and to press the Church to abandon its insistence on celibacy.
They say the chastity rule has fed the persistent, profound decline in the numbers of European and American priests. More influential voices are joining them as scandals involving sexual abuse and pedophilia spread across parishes around Europe.
The Vatican rejects any link between celibacy and sex abuse and shows no sign it intends to loosen its rules. Instead, church leaders are likely to continue a don't ask-don't tell policy of ignoring priestly relationships, as long as they cause no harm.
"Love, my love for Marga, never held me back from having faith. On the contrary, it encouraged me," Laclau told The Associated Press by telephone from his home in Asson, in the mountains near the pilgrimage site at Lourdes. "I lived my love life with Marga, and I kept my passion for the church."
The two met when Laclau led the funeral service for Marga's first husband in 1985. When their relationship blossomed, he said, "at first, we tried to hide it."
Slowly their friends learned, and Laclau's church colleagues, who met them "with a silence, not of disapproval, but of non-interference," he said.
The church's quiet tolerance melted when Marga came to live with Leon in 2001. Laclau's superior, Father Benat Oyhenart, asked him to "purify the relationship" _ in essence to choose between his vocation and his love.
Laclau chose Marga. In 2007, he was forced out of the priesthood.
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=235&sid=10046537