Hedin, Raymond (William) 1943-

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HEDIN, Raymond (William) 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born 1943; married second wife; children: two. Education: Attended St. Francis Seminary, Milwaukee, WI, 1957-66; University of Virginia, Ph.D., 1974.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Indiana University, Ballantine Hall 129, 1020 East Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405-7103. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Indiana University, Bloomington, professor of American literature, c. 1974—.

WRITINGS:

Married to the Church (nonfiction), Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1995, revised edition, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Raymond Hedin, a former seminary student, is the author of Married to the Church, which reports on the emotional states of Hedin's former fellow students at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee several decades after graduation. Hedin spent nine years in the seminary, from 1957 to 1966, and he received both his high school diploma and his first college degree from the Catholic institution. However, Hedin decided to leave the seminary before taking the additional training required for the priesthood. Many of his fellows at the seminary, however, went on to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Hedin was inspired to write Married to the Church after he attended a seminary reunion in 1985. The author, disclosing in the book that he had experienced a range of midlife troubles, learned that his former seminarians had struggled with similar emotional issues, including issues surrounding sexuality and social acceptance. Throughout the remainder of the decade, Hedin conducted interviews with his former seminarians, including twenty-two priests, six individuals who had left the priesthood, and several others who had, like Hedin, left the seminary before completing their studies. "The book," remarked Wayne A. Holst, reviewing the revised edition for the National Catholic Reporter, "provides an encounter, for those who are not priests, with humans who happen to be in the priesthood."

Hedin's project, which Robert Coles described in the New York Times Book Review as "a major social science inquiry," yields some provocative revelations about life in the priesthood. Although the original edition, published in 1995, concentrates on the personal issues that their calling to the priesthood raised for Hedin's former classmates, in 2003 Hedin re-interviewed his classmates, asking them about their reactions to the sexual-abuse scandals then surfacing in church circles. In the process Hedin learned that several individuals had resigned from the priesthood over dissatisfaction with church policies on issues such as abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, and he also discovered that some of those remaining in the priesthood were displeased with the church's taboos regarding those issues.

Many Americans have expectations of priests that are personified by popular icons such as Bing Crosby's priest character in the 1940s films Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's. Modern priests feel burdened by such expectations regarding their own weaknesses and foibles. Their dissatisfaction, Christian Century contributor Marilynne S. Mason stated, includes "loneliness, concern about their spiritual lives, disappointment … and uncertainty about the future of ordained ministry." According to Hedin, these feelings may be linked to priests' realization that the Church reforms promised in Vatican II would probably not come to pass in their lifetimes.

Married to the Church serves as more than a report or summary of Hedin's findings. Hedin includes accounts of various individuals, including a priest who conducted a ten-year romance—never consummated—with a female parishioner, as well as comments from priests who did enter into sexual relationships. In addition to such choices about their own lives, priests are often called upon to justify the church's political positions on controversial subjects even when they themselves disagree with such positions. According to Hedin, remarked Chronicle of Higher Education writer Kari Stickford, "those [priests] who are happiest have created 'a liveable priesthood' for themselves by trying to work around those things that frustrate them about the church." "For the priests in the book," explained Stickford, "'a liveable priesthood' means anything from ignoring certain church teachings to carrying on long-term sexual relationships."

Robert Coles, in his New York Times Book Review assessment, deemed Married to the Church "a long personal essay, sometimes inward and confessional, sometimes aimed descriptively outward." Coles also described the book as a "spiritual biography." Booklist contributor Steve Schroeder, on the other hand, called the book "an autobiography of sorts, ultimately more concerned with midlife identity than with the priest-hood." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that Married to the Church is "an important piece of work, not only in the Roman Catholic world, but for all Christendom."