Mark Hayden may have doubted the Catholich church, but now he is an Anglican rector, with a wife and two children, and his vocation is as strong as ever, writes Róisín Ingle

It's a sunny day in Gorey, Co Wexford and Mark Hayden is pushing his two-year-old son Daniel in a buggy, greeting neighbours as he walks from the bus stop in the town to his home down the road. He talks about having chicken pesto for dinner later and about his wife, Lorraine, who will be cooking.

As we turn into the gate, he says his other son, five-year-old martial-arts-mad Luke, is out at his first karate lesson. Once inside, he takes off the collar that curls around the neck of his stripy shirt and pushes it into the pocket of his black jeans.

Mark Hayden used to be a Catholic priest, but these days he is a rector of a large group of Co Wexford parishes with the Church of Ireland.

Since he resigned from his position in the Catholic church 10 years ago, he's never stopped answering questions about his journey from celibate Catholic priest to married Anglican rector. His book, Changing Collars, is his attempt to fully answer those questions, but what the book is not, he points out, is a hatchet job designed to hurt his former employers.

"It's not an attack on the Roman Catholic church," he says, as Luke runs out to the garden. "Anyone expecting a tirade like that will be very disappointed . . . there would be no point, it would demean who I am."

This is said with the kind of self-awareness Hayden could not have possessed when he took his first steps into the Catholic church more than 20 years ago. He was 18 and attracted to life in the priesthood, but unsure as to what exactly that meant. Growing up in Newcastle, Co Wicklow, a member of the Civil Defence forces, his other dream had been a life in the British military, an ambition he abandoned for the church.

"I'd made some enquiries about the army in England and while over there a relation had said that I'd make a lovely priest. Then our school chaplain gave a very good talk on his life which appealed to me," he says, adding that it was a time when priests could do no wrong. "Remember this was the mid 1980s; people were still entering the priesthood in good numbers and it was still a valid, viable career path."

His parents were supportive but concerned. "I was an only child, I hadn't had an overly religious upbringing and they said they would support me if I wanted to leave training," he says. Life in the Dublin diocesan seminary at Holy Cross College, Clonliffe was tough, he says, describing the isolation of living, sleeping, eating and studying in such sheltered confines.

Despite bouts of uncertainty about some of the church's teachings and life in the priesthood, he never considered not being ordained.

"It wasn't easy but I always knew I was always going to see it through," he says. "I think there was a sense among some of us that we were going to change the world. There was that feeling that things wouldn't always be the same in the church, in terms of issues like celibacy. You could say I was naive; I like to think I was hopeful."

AT THE TIME, he felt it was odd that sexuality was rarely mentioned during his seven years of training.

In 1986, while attending interviews to ascertain his suitability for the priesthood, he was asked whether he had ever slept with a man. When he replied no, the subject was dropped. "It didn't seem to matter if I was sleeping with women, but the only concern was if I was gay," he says. The second time celibacy was brought up was when an optional workshop on the subject was offered at the end of his time in Clonliffe.

He and his fellow seminarians were "desperate to be ordained", he says. "But it was just that . . . the college did not prepare us for the life we would be living as ordained priests . . . I was not taught how to chair meetings, how to conduct many of the sacraments, how to run a home or manage my tax. I think over seven years some of this could have been covered. We were just unprepared."

On the day he was ordained in 1993, there was, he says, "a huge element of not being completely sure. Like a couple getting married and one of them knows in their hearts it's not going to work." While priests were still held in high status - he remembers being embarrassed when an elderly man stopped him in the street to kneel and kiss his hands - this was a time when Bishop Eamon Casey's affair with Annie Murphy had been disclosed and there were rumbles of a worse scandal, child abuse, in the Catholic church. Hayden pushed the doubts away and threw himself into parish work in Bayside in north Co Dublin.

He says he enjoyed this time, but as child-abuse revelations mounted about priests (he knew some of those who were convicted), his disillusionment began to grow.

He also became less happy about reading letters written by bishops from the pulpit, feeling they weren't being realistic about parishioners' lives. During the divorce referendum, he urged the congregation to vote according to their own conscience, which was in conflict with the letter he had just read out from the bishop.

The young priest had also begun to minister to those whose lifestyle excluded them from the sacraments of the church, according to official Catholic teaching.

HIS FIRST SUCH JOB came from a woman who worked in a local chip-shop. "She put an extra burger in the bag and asked me to come and see her," he smiles. When he visited, she told him that her partner had been married before and she was finding it difficult to find a priest who would bless their union.

"I agreed to do it. People came to know about me. I supported gay couples, I gave communion to a woman who had been turned away because she was in a second relationship," he says. "The God I believed in, the God I still believe in, is a god of love and a god of second chances."

Around this time he began applying for a job as a military chaplain with the British army, hoping to combine his military interest with his vocation. He got fit, started rock climbing and lost six stone in weight. With the approval of his bishop, he went through the initial application stages and eventually was sent to ask permission from the archbishop to continue the process. "He told me to stop playing soldiers and be a good priest and go back to the parish," he says.

What happened next, he believes, was a reaction to this incident, but also to the growing disillusionment he felt with the Catholic church. He began a brief relationship with a woman, a local school teacher.

"I was not in a good place, as they say, it was doomed from the start," he says. When the relationship was discovered, he took a leave of absence from the parish, but was still supported by the church.

"They were very good to me at this time," he says. "I essentially had a breakdown. It was a very difficult period. I came out of it knowing I still had a strong vocation but I just wasn't sure it was with the Catholic church."

Hayden was placed in a parish near his home parish in Co Wicklow for a year - "I think they wanted people I knew to keep an eye on me" - but by this stage was already having conversations with members of the Anglican church about becoming a Church of Ireland priest. "I know some people might think it was wrong to stay in the parish but I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing," he says.

His life was further complicated by the fact that he had met Lorraine, a warm Dublin woman who kept the true nature of their relationship secret from most friends and family, until Hayden was accepted into the Church of Ireland and left the Catholic church for good. "I just knew he was the one," she says, filling wine glasses and bringing dinner plates out to the sun-filled garden. "I knew early on we had a future together."

Telling his parents was probably the hardest part, he says, and while his relationship with his father suffered for a while, they are close again now.

Life for the Haydens in Gorey is good. Mark is one of three local clergy who are former Catholic priests, so the rector's situation is not that unusual. "I like to remind people that not everyone in a collar is a Catholic priest," he smiles. He also still indulges his military interest with a sizeable collection of war memorabilia. He's the author of two books, one on war medals and another on German chaplains during the second World War.

He still feels saddened that the Catholic church's teachings exclude people and describes writing Changing Collars as "cathartic".

"When I look back there are some things I might have done differently, but all this time my love of God and my vocation never wavered. I truly love what I do," he says.

Changing Collars is published next week by Columba Press, €9.99