Why a Jewish Oncologist Became an Episcopal Priest

Like most of his congregants at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown, Father Albert wasn't born an Episcopalian. In fact, he first walked into St. John's almost 20 years ago as a Jewish physician. He had done a lot of searching to find a spiritual home since his high-school days, when he attended Hebrew classes. "I wasn't very religious, but I always read everything I could get my hands on about religion, regardless of tradition," he says. Peering through round, owlish glasses, he is subdued when discussing his decision to enter the priesthood. The choice is still "very painful" to some members of his family, he says, but to him it was a change of profession more than of faith.

However he frames it, Father Albert is not alone. A surprising number of Americans are switching from one religion to another. A 2007 survey done by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 44 percent of Americans profess a different religious affiliation from the one they were raised in. Excluding shifts between Protestant denominations, the number—28 percent—is still remarkably high. (Never having asked the question before, the Pew researchers had nothing to compare it with and are back in the field to ask, among other things, how many converts eventually return to their childhood faith.)

In his former career, Albert Scariato specialized in radiation oncology. He'd often find himself at night tossing and turning, agonizing over the sufferings of his patients. Almost all were battling cancer, but in the mid-'80s, AIDS was also becoming a potent force—something Scariato felt keenly as a gay man. "If someone came in with AIDS, it was usually a young man with pneumocystis pneumonia and he was dead within a matter of days," he says. "I had no idea if [one day] I were going to be that man on a stretcher, and that really made me identify with my patients in a huge way."

Scariato was humbled by the courage and fortitude he saw on a daily basis. And he was frustrated. He would take a patient's history, do the physical exam and explain what he thought was going on and what he could do to help. "But I would also see other questions in their eyes," he says. "Unspoken questions: 'Why do you think this happened to me? Am I being punished for something?' " he says. There was rarely time to delve into such issues. "Every day I had a stack of papers sometimes a foot tall next to my phone that needed my initials on them."

Then in 1989 his partner was diagnosed with AIDS. He'd been raised Episcopalian, and the couple started attending first the National Cathedral in Washington and then the smaller, more intimate St. John's in Georgetown. The Sunday before his partner entered the hospital to participate in an experimental medical trial, the sermon was about how Jesus had taken the cross—an instrument of unspeakable torture—and transformed it into a symbol before which people genuflect. The priest asked: what in our lives is so unbearable, so unspeakable, and what can we do with God's help to turn it around? Sitting in the pews, Scariato says, he realized, "This is what I feel I'm being called to do."

He began the ordination process in 1990 while continuing to practice medicine. A lay committee of about eight people from the parish met with him extensively over several months. After winning diocesan approval, he was ready to start seminary, but delayed his entry a year to care for his partner, who died in March 1993. Scariato's last day as a radiation oncologist was Aug. 27, 1993. Two days later he was sitting in the chapel of Virginia Theological Seminary.

Father Albert says he is most comfortable in a place of worship where people with doubts and questions are welcome. He is candid about the fact that his sexual orientation was and probably still is an issue for some in the church. On the morning of his ordination to the priesthood at St. John's in 1997, someone nailed an objection to the church door à la Martin Luther. The church was packed and the officiating priest, a woman, had planned that the congregation would sing the longest hymn in the hymnal while the lay leadership and the bishop heard the protest in the parish hall. Midway through the verses, the bishop returned to declare Father Albert had been fully and fairly evaluated and that the ordination would proceed. His words received a thunderous, 10-minute ovation.

The church has grown since then, and Father Albert says he is "hard-pressed to name a whole slew of cradle Episcopalians" among the congregants. He's known for biblically based sermons that can be applied to daily life and that convey a message of social justice. He spends much of his time ministering to the sick and dying, and reaching out to the poor. Does he miss his old profession? "I feel I never left it."