Recovering Catholic

Disillusioned Roman Catholics will welcome Joanne Meehl's accounts of women who have left their Roman Catholic loyalties and observance behind. Eighty women, all of whom answered ads seeking such stories, completed the questionnaires and reports that are the bases for Meehl's narrative. Defining her target respondents as ``women who have given up on a church that has not been home for them,'' the author sought also for women who wanted ``encouragement and guidance'' for moving on. Many readers will undoubtedly find just that in these pages, along with consolation for their own journeys through the six stages of being ``recovering Catholics.'' But this is not the place to look for the balance or the theological insights that have informed the post-Vatican II era. Chapters here begin with selections from the 1953 Baltimore Catechism. Moreover, as often as not, the women quoted have already moved on, most of them into Universalist Unitarian congregations or into one of 13 other alternatives profiled briefly by Meehl, alternatives that vary from Judaism to Jehovah's Witnesses. (Feb.)