Talking Treason in Church: The Lay Person's Guide to Renewing the Catholic Church

Marren, Joseph P.

Joe Marren is a Chicago Catholic and a late bloomer as an author. He has an A.B. from Loyola University Chicago (1957; major in Latin, minor in history) and an M.A. from the University of Kentucky (1958; major in ancient languages-Latin and Ancient Greek-minor in linguistics). He has a nodding acquaintance with several European languages and has been a student of Church history for more that 50 years. His working life has been divided among editing, public relations, and sales and administrative support. For his first job out of college, he edited a four-volume Catholic missal, one of whose contributors was the then-unknown Father Andrew Greeley, who wrote introductions to the four volumes. Greeley needed a lot of editing, Joe recalls. Otherwise, his life has been unexceptional. He did spend a year in Panama as a boy on the eve of WWII. His father worked in the Canal Zone and Joe was sent to what turned out to be an all Spanish-speaking Catholic school for first grade; he knew no Spanish, and his father, a widower, was unaware of the language situation. Joe finally learned to read English in Panamanian summer school. Shortly after Pearl Harbor he and his younger brother flew back to the U.S. on a DC-3, a life-long memory. Joe is married to Mary Hereley Marren, whom he met when she was the first woman editor-in-chief of the Loyola University News and he a reporter. They raised nine children, all now college graduates and married. Besides their children, they dote on their 17 grandchildren. Joe wrote the first chapter of this book in 1998 to explain to his family why he remained a Catholic. The rest of the book, calling for a revival of lay leadership of the Catholic church and an unseating of the current clerical leaders, was written in reaction to the predator-priest scandal that made news in Boston in 2002. Since writing Talking Treason, Joe believes that all bishops should be recalled and recertified by consensus-decision-making elections in their own dioceses and that they should run against opposing candidates from the laity, both women and men.