For 25 years John Tettemer lived behind the cloistered walls of one of Catholicism’s most austere religious orders. As Father Ildefonso he rose to the Church’s loftiest heights, finally becoming Consulator General of the Passionist Order at the unprecedented age of 38.

A confidant of Popes, a brilliant and respected teacher, his future promised greatness. Yet he abandoned it all, breaking through the monastic wall to total insecurity as a middle-aged child in harsh realities of another world he had barely known.

John Tettemer left because his life as a monk was no longer tenable. He had suffered a loss of intellectual innocence for which the Church’s anciently reasoned responses no longer sufficed: “My conscience forced the decision upon me.”

Here is the unforgettable story of the birth, growth and death of a monk — and the “rebirth” of a man secure in his mind and free in his own conscience.