Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church [Paperback]

In Full Pews and Empty Altars (1993), Schoenherr and Lawrence Young produced the definitive demographic study of the American Catholic priesthood of the late 20th century. Schoenherr planned the present work, written in 1995, as a follow-up study. After his death in 1996, the manuscript was given to his former student Yamane (sociology, Notre Dame Univ.), who made editorial revisions and arranged for its publication. The book's premise is that the decline in the number of priests is the engine driving the social forces creating pressure for structural change in the Catholic Church. Schoenherr argues that the Church needs to lift its ban on ordaining married men-a move he sees as the inevitable result of irreversible historic trends. Such a transformation would serve to strengthen "authentic religion" within Catholicism and would dismantle one of the strongest supports for patriarchy in human society. Though the ideas here will be controversial among Catholics, this is an important study and one of the stronger books to take on this subject in the past year. Recommended for all seminary and academic libraries and for most public libraries.
David I. Fulton, Coll. of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"As convincing in its analysis as [Full Pews, Empty Altars] was in its statistics."--Garry Wills, The New York Times Book Review

"This book will bring rich rewards to all who delve into its pages and ensures that Richard Schoenherr will be remembered as one of the truly prophetic social scientists of the study of the priesthood."--National Catholic Reporter

"[Goodbye Father] concerns much more than an argument about who should be ordained; his significant scholarly reflection on the interplay between religion and modern society deserve serious study....Exceptional is Schoenherr's analysis of the social conditions that are changing the face of Roman Catholicism and virtually every dimension of ministry."--America

"Richard Schoenherr was a first-rate social scientist with a first-rate grasp of the inner workings of the Catholic Church and especially its priesthood. In Goodbye Father, Schoenherr has left us a rich and lasting gift which illuminates many of the issues that continue to challenge and vex the Church. Its wisdom and insights mark a clear path toward their eventual resolution."--Richard P. McBrien, Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame; author of Catholicism and Lives of the Saints

"Goodbye Father is Richard Schoenherr's masterpiece, and a remarkable last will and testament that bears light into the contemporary discussion of celibacy for priests, scattering the darkness so that we may pause, lower our defenses, and begin to grasp the complexity of this issue and its relationship to institutional Catholicism. This book is as calm, steady, and courageous as Richard Schoenherr himself was as it strikes off the chains of our preconceptions, freeing us to learn from a master teacher. This book is indispensable, a great gift to this very moment in which this searching light scans every dimension of the subject without raising the heat."--Eugene Kennedy, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Loyola University of Chicago; author of The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality

"Goodbye Father is a timely book. It builds on Richard Schoenherr's 1993 study of the declining numbers of the Roman Catholic priesthood, Full Pews and Empty Altars. It takes that book the second step with an analysis of the sociological and structural patterns that either promote or impede a transformation in the Catholic Church toward a new model of priesthood that can include women and married men. For Schoenherr only such a transformation can really respond to the present crisis of the priesthood." - Rosemary RadfordRuether, author of Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology

"Richard Schoenherr tackles one of the most important questions facing today's Catholic Church: How much longer will the Church be able to maintain a priesthood that is exclusively celibate and male? Part heartfelt theology, part hard-nosed sociology, part hopeful manifesto, this book's answer will please some and dismay others, but no one interested in the future of the Church should ignore it."--Mark Chaves, author of Ordaining Women