Faithful, Yet Not Traditional Catholics

Like Catholic priests everywhere, Bishop Peter Hickman dons a white tunic each Sunday to celebrate Mass in a sanctuary laden with incense and crosses.

Unlike most, he'll often have lunch with his wife and children afterward.

"Marriage promotes growth," says Hickman, 50, who has fathered five children, been married three times and divorced twice. "People who've never been married have a hard time knowing themselves."

Marriage and children aren't the only things separating Hickman from nearly all Roman Catholic clergy. The church he has pastored for more than 20 years, St. Matthew in Orange, operates much like any other Catholic church, and offers what appear to be the same sacraments. Yet it ordains female, married and openly gay priests, recognizes divorce, accepts birth control and premarital sex, blesses same-sex unions and, most important, rejects the authority of the pope.

Occupying cramped storefront quarters in a strip mall, Hickman and his church have become the center of the nation's largest coalition of liberal independent Catholic churches, the Ecumenical Catholic Communion.

"Hickman is a missionary," says Kathleen Kautzer, a sociology professor at Regis College, a Massachusetts Catholic school. "This is an important development in the field."

Fueled by the church's sexual abuse scandal and increasing demands for full participation by women, gays and others, the independent Catholic movement has gained momentum in the last several years. After starting out three years ago with seven parishes representing about 1,700 people, Hickman said, the Ecumenical Catholic Communion now comprises 23 parishes serving nearly 3,200 people in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Minnesota, Florida and New York.

Kautzer, who is writing a book on breakaway Catholic churches like the ECC, estimates there are more than 300 independent Catholic congregations nationwide serving at least 5,000 people. That's a tiny percentage of the country's estimated 60 million Catholics. But the number is growing rapidly, experts say, among those who reject the faith's conservative social teachings yet remain theologically Catholic.

"Our Catholic identity is very important to us," Hickman says, "but the Catholic Church no longer has a monopoly on sacraments." Speaking to his congregation, Hickman goes even further, saying the Roman church hierarchy has betrayed the Gospel.