When I invited Catholics to participate in the study, I asked them if they described themselves as “raised Catholic”, a common expression in Australian Catholic parlance. I also inquired if they had experienced and were prepared to discuss a personal situation in which they had experienced tension between their life experience and their understanding of Church teachings and practices. If they answered “yes” to these two conditions they were eligible for the study. Some laughed and asked me how much time I had. Others were thoughtful. They said that there were definitely big issues, but they were not ready to discuss them. Those Catholics indicated that issues would come to the surface of consciousness for them and then need to be addressed; a process they chose not to embark upon at the time. Some Catholics advised that they had never experienced difficulties in the practice of their faith and therefore were not eligible for the study.

I sought as wide a variety of people from different social locations as possible: lay women and men from different ethnicities and races; from different sexual orientations; married, single and divorced; priests, Sisters and Christian Brothers, and those who had moved on from any of these roles. Though forty peoples' interviews are used in this book, twenty-eight women and twenty men were interviewed initially; forty-one were lay persons, three were Sisters and four were priests. Follow-up interviews were arranged so that people could offer information they thought of after their first interview and I could clarify any points of interpretation.