With $10,000 in the bank and a background in advertising/marketing, it was obvious to me that I needed to begin creating awareness among the Catholic on the street regarding mandatory celibacy, shortage of priests and the fact that there were 20,000 priests who married, somewhere out there in the U.S. Since regular news releases on mandatory celibacy were getting nowhere, I became inspired to write a few ads, something I had never done in my thirteen years with a major Boston advertising agency. I had done some media buying and was their first female account executive back in the early 1970s--more the business end than the creative side of advertising.
I hired a media-buying service to research the best publications for CITI's consumer ads. My needs: small space, regional, quick turnaround as oppose to long due dates for copy. While the media-buying service was reviewing the market, I was doing my own research: finding which dioceses had the worst shortages combined with the highest percentage of Catholics. The top media recommendation was TV Guide Magazine, pocket size in those days. It was also a good buy because their 30% discount for nonprofit organizations and placing space as a "house" agency made the ads more affordable.
One-quarter-page ads were scheduled in 7 out of 106 U.S. TV Guide markets during the spring of 1992. Copy was geared toward the general public, asking for comments and letters regarding mandatory celibacy that would be sent to the bishops. At the same time, I wrote a series of corresponding small space ads that were directed to the bishops and would run in NCR. These poked fun at the silliness of the law of mandatory celibacy, perhaps the first time anyone publicly made wisecrack comments about anything in the church.
Just for the heck of it, I entered a batch of ads in the prestigious New England Hatch Awards advertising competition. CITI's series of the following five ads were among the few hundred chosen out of 2,300 entries for public exhibition at the Prudential Center in Boston (as did other CITI ads for the following two years). This creative work was being recognized alongside topnotch print ads for such nonprofit advertising clients as the Archdiocese of Boston. What a rush!
More importantly, the response to the TV Guide advertising was overwhelming. These ads reached people like myself--those who had never heard about the impact of mandatory celibacy on priests and nuns. (At this point, I had heard that many priests had married nuns.) TV Guide later wrote that they had not received this many comments on any advertising in 13 years...and we had run ads in only 7 out of 106 TV markets. One woman wrote TV Guide, "To whoever has charge of ads in TV Guide: Will someone please send me a copy of the TV Guide that had an ad in it about an organization trying to get people to try and get permission for priests to marry. I lost this copy and I want to send for this literature...I am 93 years old and I'd love to see this problem solved before my days are over. P.S. Mother of 10, Grandmother of 40 Great grandmother of 32."
The overall public response was 90% in favor of optional celibacy in the priesthood with the most popular comment from people who couldn't understand how priests were counseling about marriage if they themselves were not married and had not even lived at home with their parents since they were 12 or 13.
One of the ads ran in the New York City edition of TV Guide and caught the attention of the producers of ABC-TV's 20/20. They subsequently interviewed various people and produced a 20 minute segment on mandatory celibacy that ran the following December, the first of its kind on national television.
No response ever came from the hierarchy of the church regarding the above ads that had been running every other week in National Catholic Reporter, though I did meet an Archbishop at the annual November bishops conference in Washington D.C. My one question to him was, "How can the church justify throwing out the front door, priests who marry when they bring in the back door, married priests with families from other denominations and ordain them into the Roman Catholic priesthood?" He replied, "When a priest is trying to decide whether or not to leave, there is a lot of love and understanding on the part of the institution; but when he walks out that door, resentment sets in." That this comment would come from a man of God confirmed what I had read in books like Shattered Vows (Rice, David) about the shabby treatment of priests who marry.
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