Customer Reviews

The Other Side of the Altar: One Man's Life in the Catholic Priesthood

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dinter's account shows how this man unfortunately chose the wrong vocation. Many of his books have succeeded in faulting the Church for its many ills, yet his own personal responsibility seems lacking. Some of his stories are exaggerated. I too was at Columbia during his time, and he was known for alienating and dividing many students with his political ideas. Although he was close to some of the '60s leaders, by the 1980s Dinter continued to preach ideas that had long passed that generation. He controlled his community in Ford Hall (some of whom were not students) with a political agenda, requiring people to lie down in front of police cars and getting jailed for anti-nuclear demonstrations. The lawsuit filed against him was largely due to what what most people deemed as a messy personality conflict. Whatever happened between him and this woman no one really knew, but it exploded into a controversy that eventually led in part to his transfer from Columbia University (they settled the lawsuit and readmitted the woman to the congregation). Although I sympathize with his criticisms of Opus Dei, I recall during one campus event Dinter's group marched into the back of the room where a priest from Opus Dei was speaking and made rude comments and loud criticisms. Many times he complained openly about Church celibacy and at others turned the Mass into a forum launching a tirade against political leaders and anyone who voted for them. He was very unhappy with the priesthood and his resignation came as no surprise.

Dinter's portrayal of himself as an innocent victim is far different than what others knew of him. His account is so self righteous that he omits many other issues. For instance, he publicly announced, when he returned to Columbia University after a trip to the then-communist Russia, that there was no religious persecution in the Societ Union. Naturally, many Jews were offended.

Dinter's problematic encounters with students show how "playing therapist" got him in way over his head. He counseled young people using Freudian psychology when he had no graduate training or license in the field (he's a Biblical scholar by training). His conflict with Rosa, who he said came on to him (she said he came on to her) was a case in point, which embarassed Columbia and possibly led to his transfer. (Incidentally, contrary to what Dinter insists, Columbia University--which is neither the church nor the state--was responsible for campus religious activities.) But Dinter's recount of this and other incidents is so one sided that one wonders just how honest he really is.

Paul Dinter gives the Catholic laity a rare view into the process of priestly formation. The Other Side of the Altar confirmed some of my ideas of this process, but revealed many other aspects of the continuous formation of Catholic clergy.

Mr. Dinter's use of his own story, his personal experiences, makes the book credible and interesting. The layers of possible dysfunctional behavior -- that of the individual priest, the collective group of priests and the entire Roman Catholic hierarchy -- are intertwined and bring understanding to many of the problems currently associated with the Catholic clergy.

The author clearly defines a curious view of human sexuality that is mainstream to past and present Catholic doctrine. How important this issue is to letting the Catholic Church move forward and into the new millennium is a matter for all readers to decide. Paul Dinter's ideas on this issue certainly broadened my perspective in this area.

Paul Dinter spares no punches and names some prominent people that touched his priestly formation. A great read for all readers and a must read for all Catholics.

I knew Paul Dinter well, during my years at Columbia from 1974 to 1978, and kept in contact with him for an additional 15 years. This book, rushed for publication, is an accurate portrayal of the facts, and Paul's uncomfortable fit into the roman collar. From my viewpoint, he is basically honest concerning his relationship to his father, his polarized association with episcopal authority, and his grudging acceptance of a celibate discipline. I applaud his honesty in relaying some uncomfortable facts.

Yet, the facts alone are not enough to restore health. I myself have felt the hurt of Paul's acerbic delivery. Now, he broadens his assault to the "Men's Club on the Tiber", knowing full well that "Rome will not change". Is celibacy a hierarchical control mechanism? Tell that to the Dalai Lama. Tell that to American Shakers. You don't have to be Catholic to define a correlation between sexuality and spirituality. But is celibacy still relevant? Paul hints at the advantages that monks and ordered clergy have, but then dismisses any investigation into how to reform the routine of diocesan clergy to acclimate to celibacy. It's in this refusal, buried by his father induced wounds, that the book falls apart. Publishing is like preaching. You talk, but you don't have to listen. Paul has been doing both for too long. He has significantly contributed to the noise; possibly modestly contributed to the debate; and sadly, unconstructively detracted from a solution.

This is a riveting breathtakingly honest look behind the scenes of today's Catholic priesthood in America. It's not about the headline sexual abuse scandals. It's about abuse that seldom makes the headlines -- abuse inflicted by the systemically dysfunctional climate within which priests must conduct their lives. The picture is not a pretty one -- honest expression stifled, initiatives thwarted, and normal human friendships crippled or tabooed. It shows the disabling effect on priests of being subject to heavy-handed authority, unyielding dogma, unrealistic law, and a code of celibacy that is a prescription for aching loneliness. All too often alcohol and other addictions fill the vacuum. But this is not an angry book. Dinter doesn't whine or rant. And that is the book's power. It objectively states facts, events and names. Dinter clearly loved his ministry and pursued it with energy and commitment. But the tension between this pursuit of his calling, and the human toll exacted as the price of membership in the priestly caste, became intolerable. So he resigned, not from his ideals, but from the dysfunctional system within which he was forced to try and live out these ideals. Dinter's quiet eloquence gives us a rare glimpse into the abuse inflicted on good priests by the disabling role expectations of an outmoded caste system.

This revealing book sheds light on the seminary training and life in the priesthood which finally ended for the author after a 39-year journey. The writing in this book flows well as the author begins with his life as a child, his seminary years, pastoral work in several parishes, campus chaplaincy, doctoral work, and a sabbatical at the Vatican. He tells about bad priests he encountered along the way and the many good priests who remain devoted to the flocks that they serve.

I wondered how he could continue as a seminarian in such a repressive and then permissive atmosphere. A sign should have been placed over the seminary door: "Beware all ye who enter here!"

He was a glutton for punishment from his domineering, powerful prelates as a priest, and I wondered why he stayed in the priesthood. After a lengthy description about all the good work he and others had accomplished while he was a chaplain at Columbia University, I expected that he would at least receive high marks from the bishop. Instead, he was called on the carpet and told that he no longer had a job!

He then went to study for a year in Rome after spending a summer in England. He describes the Vatican disparagingly as "a men's club on the Tiber." He was uncomfortable in the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust that prevailed there. When a group of priests had dinner with a visiting bishop from America, it was a command performance where the bishop embarrassed and humiliated the priests instead of being an enjoyable occasion of friendship and congeniality.

Upon returning to the U.S., he was not given an assignment and was treated with disdain when he pleaded with the chancery office to place him somewhere. When he received no placement, he took matters into his own hands and asked a fellow priest if he could stay at his rectory. After he moved there, he substituted as a fill-in priest in that area and also taught at colleges. He soon made many friends among the laity who supported him when he fell in love with a widow in the parish, left the priesthood, and married there. They are still members of that parish.

Dr. Dinter's experiences with his bishops left me with bad feelings toward them. The career men fawning on their superiors so that they will receive promotions are a despicable lot who have lost sight of the church as the Body of Christ. For them it has become a corporate ladder, and they care not for the lowly priests under their dominion after they reach the top.

I believe the author's writing is an honest, brave portrayal of his priesthood. One prevailing theme is the unnecessary mandated celibacy for priests, which he compares with a disability. The book explains why so many priests become sexually abusive to children and adolescents.

Dr. Dinter paints priests as extremely lonely men who cannot openly dissent about any Catholic teaching for fear of being ostracized by their superiors and/or being sent off to remote parishes in the hinterland. Banishment is the club held over the heads of priests and is an effective silencer for any dissenter. The priests cannot even openly discuss controversial issues in the church privately when they meet with each other which I found disturbing. Facing their future with fear and the silence it promotes smacks too much of "big brother" watching every move the priests make and everything they say. Priests should not have to function in this repressive atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.

I was so glad that this book ended on a positive note for the author because his many years of dedicated work in the priesthood went unappreciated by the hierarchy under which he served.

Dinter does not produce social science, moral theology, or anything but his
rather folksy account of his own experience in seminary and parishes.
For this reason, his book is must reading. The reader can find out some of
the HOW in the question HOW did this all happen.
The problem is in the system.

This is a sad story that Dinter has written. Notwithstanding some of the hate I have just finished reading in reviews of Dinter here by apparently former Columbia U. students who were there when Dinter was, this book goes beyond those students (reviewers) to the issue of how the Catholic rulership treats its Priests and deceived them in the days immediately pre and post Vatican Two.

It matters not whether Dinter was at Columbia, Stonybrook, Laval, Loyola, Stanford, or Siena. What is essential to this work is the ambience that Dinter is able to forge in the reader's mind. It is that of disgust for how the Catholic hierarchy (O'Connor, Egan) in New York came to treat their own and how their own (among them Dinter) up and left the sludge that the Priesthood became upon the deceit of Rome through its Vatican Two Council. Dinter makes that point repeatedly through circumabient references. Those who were there with him know his references. Dare one say that many would never have become Priests pre-Vatican Two if they knew that there was going to be a Vatican Two and what it would reap.

Dinter's book is worth reading. It shows how the pre-Vatican Two priest (like Dinter) left and why. While we understand it clearly and lucidly, unfortuntely Dinter's Cardinal bosses couldn't have cared less what happened with Dinter or others who up and left. They have their soft easy chairs, their fine dinnerware, their ermine trappings, and wonderful meals at Saint Patrick's Cathedral Rectory. That's what maters to them. To Dinter's credit, there is far more to life than that-- namely truth and singleness of heart. Not the duplicity and mendacity of the Catholic Curch and its ruling gray hairs.

This important book should be required reading in every RC theologate. The author convincingly does at least two major things. First, in telling his personal story, Paul Dinter has captured perfectly the story of many, perhaps most, priests of his generation - from family life and elementary school experience in a Catholic pre-Vatican Council II "ghetto" parish to the minor seminary experience followed by philosophy and theology and how the formation, or absence thereof, during these years "neutered" or "desexed" seminarians; to entry into rectory life and the clerical culture which resulted in a celibate life destructive of authentic human development resulting in denial, overacting out, and clerial careerism. Paul Dinter correctly roots years of "mis-formation" in a theological insistence on the metaphysical distinctiveness and superiority of priests simply by reason of ordination and a promise to live a celibate life. His personal story includes his challenging and immensely satisfying years as the RC chaplain at Columbia Univesity for thirteen years, his peace activism, and twenty-three year struggle to live an authentic celibate life with much counselling and theological studies.

Second,Paul Dinter also uses his story to provide theological and psychological insights into the development of the Catholic Church in the US in the last forty years, including clerical sexual abuses and their cover-up. His telling is not a polemic but a clear observation that, until Catholic leadership recognizes authentic human sexuality as essential to an adult spirituality and also the necessity of a married priesthood as an option, thus rejecting the linking of celibacy and "sacramental power" and any superior "ontological" class status for priests, Catholic leadership can not recover credibility to provide the leadership the Church deserves and needs.

His hope is the current generation of laity created by VCII liturgy and teadhing.

I was fascinated to see how prescient Margo Jefferson of the NY Times had been in reviewing this book when it was first released:

("On Writers and Writing," Sunday NY Times Book Review, March 14, 2004): "We now have official reports on 50 years of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, sanctioned by lies and cover ups. Dinter is one of the few priests to give us the testimony we need: sustained, intelligent, layered with observations and emotion...I admire Dinter's wry modesty and his gift for seeing deeply into people. When he falters, we get dutiful prose--the formal phrasings of the classroom. But a small price to pay, all in all."

So much of what we have learned in recent years was already "hiding in plain sight", and this book reveals the attitudes and arrogance that caused so many to suffer for so long.