Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Rain’s coursing down, so a custodian waves me into Pilgrim Congregational Church’s back door. I stand, dripping, in the dim hallway, and peer around me for the Danforth Chapel. A woman stops to offer directions, but when she hears where I’m going, her lips tighten. “Our church is in here,” she says, pointing to her right. “That other group is in there.” She nods toward the back of a small altar, visible through open doors. These are the renegades: the St. Catherine of Siena parish of the American National Catholic Church.
A middle-aged couple pass me and walk briskly through the chapel’s sanctuary, past the altar, to the pews. Lightning fails to strike them, so I follow.
A youngish, round-faced priest mops his forehead—the rain’s made it humid in the damp old chapel—and begs people to move forward in the pews so he doesn’t have to shout over the fans. The Rev. Phillip Lichtenwalter’s flock numbers about 15 on this stormy Sunday morning, a size that makes it possible for everybody to hug, shake hands, or introduce themselves as they resettle.
Behind me, a fan blows a missalette out of a woman’s hands, and it glides four rows forward. She and her friends giggle freely. Directly in front of me sits Mike Viviano, a relative of the famous family on The Hill, relaxed in khaki shorts and a sport shirt. Friends suggested this church to him when he said he was a recovering Catholic, and he loves it, he whispers. “The parish I grew up in, there was nothing as personal as this. I always felt much more inhibited in church, like I was being lectured.”
After the introductory rites, Lichtenwalter says, “Please be seated for our first reading. Do we have a volunteer?”
A man in his sixties rises and goes up to the lectern.
The music for the responsorial psalm is beautiful, but recorded, as are all the hymns. People sing the refrains and responses: a holy karaoke.
After his homily, Lichtenwalter makes an-nouncements, giving every detail full attention. He has the buoyancy of a man who’s never had a sleepless night, a man who genuinely likes other human beings, a man who’s found his destiny. He compliments people on their donations to the Rulers for Schoolers program and describes how, when parish board president Lisa Pini called the Special School District to see who most needed the supplies, she wound up talking to assistant superintendent Paul Bauer. She introduced herself and started to explain the parish, and he said, “Lisa, I was just there last week.” He’d found the church online. Today, he’s back.
“This could be the beginning of a special relationship between St. Catherine and the Special School District,” Lichtenwalter says. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
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A nun looked at Phillip Lichtenwalter in second grade and announced, “You’re going to be a priest.” By junior high, his friends were calling him Father Phil. “I never wanted to be anything else,” he says simply. So when he was asked to leave the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary (a diocesan program at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota) in his junior year, he felt like the ground had broken open beneath his feet.
He’d mentioned being gay to his spiritual director—who he says promptly broke the seal of confession (something to be done only in instances of crime or danger) and reported him. “The caveat they got me on was that I never told them in the application process. My response was, ‘You never asked.’”
Lichtenwalter was completely unprepared for the drama; years earlier, when he’d told his parents, they said, “Oh, we’ve known since high school.” And this was 2000; the Vatican had not yet come out with its 2005 instruction that those with “deeply rooted homosexual tendencies” could not be ordained, even if they were celibate forever.
The same year Lichtenwalter was kicked out of the seminary—with gay seminarian friends murmuring, “You should have kept your mouth shut”—multiple allegations of sexual abuse came out against the priest who’d been pastor of his Lincoln, Ill., parish for decades.
“So that,” he says, “is how my journey away from Rome began.”
Lichtenwalter continues with the Sunday announcements: “Last week we got a 40-foot ladder and changed all the lights. But some were broken, so now, just like Bob Vila, we have a new project.”
Just as he says the word “project,” one of the lights starts to smoke. A gust of wind blows, and the outside door slams shut.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” he repeats dryly. He squints up at the smoking, crackling fixture. “Well, that’s somethingnew we get to work on,” he jokes, and mops his brow again.
“I don’t see flames, but I do see smoke,” says Pini, who, as board president, controls the parish’s finances. A harsh, dark smell fills the chapel. She digs out her cellphone and steps outside to call the fire department.
“Well, we’ll do a shortened service as we wait for the fire department,” Lichtenwalter says.
“No, Father, why don’t we get everybody out?” Pini calls from the back of the church.
He agrees.
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When Pini’s husband read information about St. Catherine of Siena parish online in 2011, she told him, “That’s too good to be true.” The Roman Catholic Church did not recognize their marriage, because Lisa had been married before and had four children. “A priest told us, ‘You guys have to live apart while you get that annulled,’” she says. “Yeah, no.
“I’m divorced, and I’m also a psychic,” she tells me while we wait for the firefighters. “I found out when I was 8—I had a dream that came true, and I got hauled into the office with two priests and two nuns. They told me never to speak or breathe about it again. Then my father said, ‘We need to talk,’ and I found out I was a fourth-generation psychic: him, his mother, his grandmother… That’s pretty much taboo in the Roman Catholic Church—they think we’re messing with the devil. And we’re not.”
Three firetrucks squeal up, and a dozen firefighters stream past us. “I guess they heard ‘church’ and thought there would be hundreds of people,” a man remarks, embarrassed.
Connie Butler, who preceded Pini as board president, comes up to chat. She’d been a staunch Roman Catholic all her life, sent her kids through Catholic schools. Then her husband fell ill. “Our pastor came maybe three times to deliver Communion,” she says. “He couldn’t get out of my house fast enough. I received more spiritual help from hospice. After my husband died, he spent five minutes saying, ‘This is what happens at the funeral Mass. I’ll see you tomorrow.’” She left the church soon after, and spent years looking for someplace else to go. “St. Catherine’s had me in the first five minutes. The idea that they were very open to people from all walks of life—that was important to me.”
Lichtenwalter tried a few other independent churches before discovering the ANCC. “I joined one group and realized they were just whack jobs playing church,” he says. “It was about titles and dressing up for them.” He served as deacon at St. Stanislaus Kostka, the Polish parish that broke from the archdiocese, but he felt a need “to belong to something bigger.” Then he came across the ANCC, just founded in 2009 but tracing its lineage to an independent church established by excommunicated Brazilian Bishop Carlos Duarte-Costa. Back in the 1930s, he’d pushed for married clergy, a stronger role for the laity, and many reforms later made by Vatican II.
Lichtenwalter liked the ANCC’s insistence that its priests go through two years of discernment and proper formation, hold a master’s degree in theological studies or divinity, and undergo a criminal background check and a psychological evaluation. Above all, he liked its openness to priests of any gender and any sexual orientation, whether they are celibate or married or have children.
“We believe that some of God’s children are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered because God created them that way,” he now tells people. “We joyfully unite same-sex couples in the sacrament of matrimony. We also empathize with the pain of a failed marriage”—in other words, no one need go through annulment proceedings to remarry.
Lichtenwalter officiates at about 150 weddings a year, as well as funerals, baptisms, and quinceañeras. He’s stunned when he hears high fees other priests have quoted. He has a secular job, night doorman at Towne House Apartments (directly across the street from the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis), and a non-Catholic partner who he says helps keep him grounded.
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As the firefighters leave, people call out thanks and offer donuts. “Just break out the incense,” somebody calls as we troop back inside the smoky chapel. No one has gone home.
Lichtenwalter resumes his announcements, mentioning the new parish cookbook and asking for recipes. “I’d be murdered if I gave out some of the family’s recipes,” Viviano murmurs.
I brace for the 2011 liturgical revisions, which were made to be more consistent with the Latin but strike my unaccustomed ear like croquet mallets. To my relief, the ANCC still uses “one in being with the Father” instead of the revised phrase “consubstantial with the Father,” and they’ve kept “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you” instead of changing to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”
We’ve reached the Eucharist—the part of the Mass where busybodies look around to see who’s staying in his or her pew. Here, all are welcome—no exclusions for non-Catholics, the unbaptized, or those in the famous category of “public and notorious sinner” that’s been used to shame politicians at the altar. “If we really believe what we say about the Eucharist,” Lichtenwalter says, “then why wouldn’t we want to give it to every sinner we run across?” The notion that sacraments have to be earned or deserved emerged, he says, when the church started using them as a source of income. “Then the theology crept in that flesh is bad and spirit is good, and that helped control the agenda, too.”
One parishioner joined St. Catherine of Siena after hearing him say, at a wedding, “All are welcome to receive the Eucharist.” When she reached the front of the Communion line, she looked at him with tears in her eyes and said, “Do you really mean it?” She’d been divorced years earlier. She remarried, so for two decades she’d gone to Mass every Sunday without receiving Communion—even after her ex-husband died.
Lichtenwalter hears stories like hers daily. “I think the hurt in the Roman Catholic Church comes from the misuse of power,” he says. “Jesus is so clear in the Scriptures: What you do to the least, you do to me. It is better that you have a millstonetied around your neck and be thrown into the depths than hurt my children.
“Our poor, stupid, little sheep who sit in our pews,” he says, imitating condescension. “People aren’t stupid. Many graduate programs now are geared toward laity, because they want to know, and they’ve always been told no, you can’t.”
The new pope may steal the ANCC’s thunder: Pope Francis has said that the Roman Catholic Church should be a “home for all” and should cease to be “obsessed” with doctrine about sexual and reproductive issues. Meanwhile, I can’t help wonder what local reaction to the ANCC has been.
“I haven’t heard a single word from Archbishop Carlson,” Lichtenwalter confides. “I did hear that the vicar of priests sent out a mass email saying we were in town. So I just sent him a thank-you note for the publicity.” He grins. “They don’t see us as a threat. The Roman Catholic Church has lasted 2,000 years, and it’s gone through worse times than we can ever imagine. But I do think people will continue to leave. One in 10 Americans is a former Roman Catholic, which would make them the third-largest denomination in the country!”
St. Catherine of Siena is looking for a new location and may eventually establish a second parish in West County; parishioner Joseph White is studying, through the University of Notre Dame, for priesthood in the ANCC.
Even if the Roman church does start to feel a little threatened, Lichtenwalter says, “the worst they could do is call us heretical schismatics. We have no desire to be Roman Catholic. We are not trying to ‘lead people astray.’” The phrase is a quote; he says a Dominican friar once told him, “You are a heretical bastard, and you are going to go to hell for leading people astray.”
“I would rather go to hell for doing what I’m doing,” Lichtenwalter replied, “than live in the heaven that you have created.”
